HOrESOFA 
CAMP-FOLLOWER 

ON THE 

\v^ESTERN FRONT 



E.W.HORNUNG 




GopyriglitN", 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIR 



NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 
ON THE WESTERN FRONT 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

THE BALLAD OF 

ENSIGN JOY 

Cloth Boards, 
75 cents net. 



E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



Notes of a Camp-follower 
on the Western Front 



^ BY 

E. W. HORNUNG 

AUTHOB OP "the BALLAD OF EN8IG1I JOT, 

"the amatbub cbacksman," etc. 




NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



Copyright, 1919, 
BY E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 



All Rights Reserved 






^- -a /d/y 



Printed In the United States of America 



A529791 



TO 

THE KINDEST MAN IN THE BOOK 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Last Post 1 

AN ARK IN THE MUD 3 

Under Way 3 

A Handful of Men 10 

Sunday on Board 17 

Bond and Free 25 

CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 29 

Under Fire 29 

Casualties 33 

An Interrupted Lunch 40 

Christmas Day 43 

The Babes in the Trenches 55 

The Forerunners 61 

DETAILS 63 

Orderly Men 63 

The Jocks 71 

Gunners 81 

The Guards 87 

Lord's Leave 95 

A BOY'S GRAVE 97 

The Boys' War 113 

THE REST HUT 115 

Fresh Ground 115 

Opening Day 124 

The Hut in Being 130 

Writers and Readers 138 

War and the Man 149 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Shell-shocJc in 157 

"WE FALL TO RISE" 159 

Before the Storm 159 

Another Opening Day 165 

The End of a Beginning 172 

The Road Back 181 

In the Day of Battle 187 

Other Old Fellows 195 

Wooden Crosses 205 

THE REST CAMP— AND AFTER 207 

The Big Thing {1918) 219 



NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 
ON THE WESTERN FRONT 



NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 
ON THE WESTERN FRONT 

LAST POST 

(1915) 

Last summer, centuries ago, 

I watched the postman's lantern glow. 

As night by night on leaden feet 

He twinkled down our darkened street. 

So welcome on his beaten track, 
The bent man with the bulging sack! 
(But dread of every sleepless couch, 
A whistling imp with leathern pouch!) 

And now I meet him in the way, 
And earth is Heaven, night is Day, 
For oh! there shines before his lamp 
An envelope without a stamp! 

Address in pencil; overhead. 

The Censor's triangle in red. 

Indoors and up the stair I bound: 

"One from the boy, still safe, still sound! 

"Still merry in a dubious trench 
They've taken over from the French; 
Still making light of duty done; 
Still full of Tommy, Fritz, and fun! 
1 



NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

"Still finding War of games the cream, 
And his platoon a priceless team — 
Still running it by sportsman's rule, 
Just as he ran his house at school. 

*'Still wild about the ^bombing stunf 
He makes his hobby at the front. 
Still trustful of his wondrous luck — 
^Prepared to take on old man Kluck!^ " 

Awed only in the peaceful spells, 
And only scornful of their shells. 
His beaming eye yet found delight 
In ruins lit by flares at night, 

In clover field and hedge-row green. 
Apart from cover or a screen, 
In Nature spurting spick and span 
For all the devilries of Man. 

He said those weeks of blood and tears 
Were worth his score of radiant years. 
He said he had not lived before — 
Our boy who never dreamt of War! 

He gave ws of his own dear glow. 
Last summer, centuries ago. 
Bronzed leaves still cling to every bough, 
I don't waylay the postman now. 

Doubtless upon his nightly heat 
He still comes twinkling down our street. 
I am not there with straining eye — 
A whistling imp could tell you why. 



I 

AN ARK IN THE MUD 

Under Way 

"There's our hut!" said the young hut-leader, 
pointing through iron palings at a couple of toy 
Noah's Arks built large. "No— that's the n^^ Di- 
vision's cinema. The Y.M.C.A. is the one be- 
yond." 

The enclosure behind the palings had been a 
parade-ground in piping times; and British squads, 
from the pink French barracks outside the gates, 
still drilled there between banks of sterilised rub- 
bish and lagoons of unmedicated mud. The place 
was to become familiar to me under many aspects. 
I have known it more than presentable in a clean 
suit of snow, and really picturesque with a sharp 
moon cocked upon some towering trees, as yet 
strangely intact. It was at its best, perhaps, as a 
nocturne pricked out by a swarm of electric torch- 
es, going and coming along the duck-boards in 
a grand chain of sparks and flashes. But its true 
colours were the wet browns and drabs of that 
first glimpse in the December dusk, with the Ark 
hull down in the mud, and the cinema a sister 
ship across her bows. 

The hut-leader ushered me on board with the 

3 



4 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

courtesy of a young commander inducting an el- 
derly new mate; the difference was that I had all 
the ropes to learn, with the possible exception of 
one he had already shown me on our way from the 
local headquarters of the Y.M.C.A. The battered 
town was full of English soldiers, to whom indeed 
it owed its continued existence on the right side 
of the Line. In the gathering twilight, and the 
deeper shade of beetling ruins, most of them sa- 
luted either my leader's British warm, or my own 
voluminous trench-coat (with fleece lining), on 
the supposition of officers within. Left to myself, 
I should have done the wrong thing every time. 
It is expressly out of order for a camp-follower to 
give or take salutes. Yet what is he to do, when 
he gets a beauty from one whose boots he is unfit 
to black? My leader had been showing me, with 
a pleasant nod and a genial civilian gesture, easier 
to emulate than to acquire. 

In the hut he left me to my own investigationa 
while he was seeing to his lamps. The round stove 
in the centre showed a rosy chimney through the 
gloom, like a mast in a ship's saloon ; and in the 
two half-lights the place looked scrupulously swept 
and garnished for our guests, a number of whom 
were already waiting outside for us to open. The 
trestle tables, with nothing on them but a dusky 
polish, might have been mathematically spaced, 
each with a pair of forms in perfect parallels, and 
nothing else but a piano and an under-sized bil- 
liard-table on all the tidy floor. The usual dis- 
play of bunting, cheap but cheerful, hung as ban- 
ners from the joists, a garish vista from platform 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 5 

to counter. Behind the counter were the shelves 
of shimmering goods, biscuits and candles in open 
cases on the floor, and as many exits as a scene 
in a farce. One door led into our room: an oblong 
cabin with camp beds for self and leader, tables 
covered with American cloth, dust, toilet requi- 
sites, more dust, candle-grease and tea-things, 
and a stove of its own in roseate blast like the 
one down the hut. 

The crew of two orderlies lived along a little 
passage in their kitchen, and were now at their 
tea on packing-cases by the boiler fire. They were 
both, like Esau, hairy men, with very little of the 
soldier left about them. Their unlovely beds 
were the principal pieces of kitchen furniture. In 
the kitchen, too, for obscure reasons not for me 
to investigate, were the washing arrangenients for 
all hands, and any face or neck that felt inclined. 
I had heard a whisper of Officers' Baths in the 
vicinity; it came to mind like the tinkle of a 
brook at these discoveries. 

At 4.30 the unkempt couple staggered in with 
the first urn, and I took my post at the tap. One 
of them shuffled down the hut to open up ; our 
young skipper stuck a carriage candle in its grease 
on the edge of the counter, over his till, saying 
he was as short of paraffin as of change; and into 
the half-lit gloom marched a horde of determined 
soldiers, and so upon the counter and my urn in 
double file. "Tea, please, sir!" "Two teas!" 
"Coop o' tay, plase!" The accents were from 
every district I had ever known, and were those of 
every class, including the one that has no accent at 



6 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

aU. They warmed the blood like a medley of 
patriotic airs, and I commenced potman as it were 
to martial music. 

It was, perhaps, the least skilled labour to be 
had in France, but that evening it was none too 
light. Every single customer began with tea: the 
mugs flew through my hands as fast as I could fill 
them, until my end of the counter swam in livid 
pools, and the tilted urn was down to a gentle 
dribble. Now was the chance to look twice at the 
consumers of our innocuous blend. One had a 
sheaf of wound-stripes on his sleeve; another was 
fresh trench-mud from leathern jerkin (where my 
view of him began) to the crown of his shrapnel 
helmet; many wore the bonnets of a famous 
Scotch Division, all were in their habit as they 
fought; and there they were waiting for their tea, 
a long perspective of patient faces, like school- 
children at a treat. And here was I, fairly 
launched upon the career which a facetious den- 
sity has summed up as "pouring out tea and 
prayer in equal parts," and prepared to continue 
with the first half of the programme till further 
orders: the other was less in my line — but I could 
have poured out a fairly fluent thanksgiving for 
the atmosphere of youth and bravery, and most 
infectious vitality, which already filled the hut. 

In the meantime there was much to be learnt 
from my seasoned neighbour at the till, and to 
admire in his happy control of gentlemen on their 
way up the Line. Should they want more 
matches than it suited him to sell, then want 
must be their master; did some sly knave appear 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 1 

at the top of the queue, without having worked 
his way up past my urn, then it was: *^I saw you, 
Jock! Go round and come up in your turn!" Or 
was it a man with no change, and was there hard- 
ly any in the till? — ^Take two steps to the rear, 
my friend, and when I have the change I'll serve 
you!'* When he had the change, the sparks 
might have flown with it through his fingers; he 
was lightning calculator and conjuror in one, knew 
the foul franc note of a dubious bank with less 
than half an eye, and how to refuse it with equal 
firmness and good-humour. I hardly knew 
whether to feel hurt or flattered at being perpetu- 
ally "Mr/* to this natural martinet, my junior, it 
is true, by decades, but a leader I was already 
proud to follow and obey. 

In the first lull he deserted me in order to make 
tea in our room, but took his with the door open, 
shouting out the price of aught I had to sell with 
an endearing verve, name and prefix included 
every time. It made me feel more than ever like 
the mate of a ship, and anxious to earn my cer- 
tificate. 

Then I had my tea — with the door shut — and 
already an aching back for part of the fun. 
For already the whole thing was my idea of fun 
— the picnic idea — an old weakness. Huts espe- 
cially were always near my heart, and our room 
in this one reminded me of bush huts adored for 
their discomfort in my teens. Of the two I pre- 
ferred the bush fireside, a hearth like a powder- 
closet and blazing logs; but candles in their own 
grease-spots were an improvement on the old 



8 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

slush-lamp of moleskin and mutton-fat. The 
likeness reached its height in the two sheetless 
bunks, but there it ended. Not a sound was a 
sound ever heard before. The continual chink of 
money in the till outside ; the movement of many- 
feet, trained not to shuffle; the constant coughing 
of men otherwise in superhuman health ; the crude 
tinkle of the piano at the far end of the hut — the 
efficient pounding of the cinema piano — the screw- 
like throb of their petrol engine — the periodical 
bringing-down of their packed house, no doubt by 
the ubiquitous Mr. Chaplin! Those were the 
sounds to which we took our tea in the state- 
room of the Ark. She might have been on a pleas- 
ure-trip all the time. 

That first night I remember going back and 
diving into open cases of candles, and counting out 
packets of cigarettes and biscuits, sticks of choco- 
late, boxes of matches, and reaching down tinned 
salmon, sardines, boot-laces, boot-polish, shaving- 
soap and tooth-paste, button-sticks, "sticks of 
lead'* (otherwise pencils), writing-pads. Nosegay 
Shag, Royal Seal, or twist if we had it, and shout- 
ing for the prices as I went, coping with the change 
by light of luck and nature, but doling out the 
free stationery with a base lingering relief, until 
my back was a hundred and all the silver of the 
allied realms one composite coin that danced 
without jingling in the till. Gold stripes meant 
nothing to me now; shrapnel hehnets were as 
high above me as the stars; the only hero was the 
man who didn't want change. Often in the early 
part I thought the queue was coming to an end; 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 9 

it was always the sign for a fresh influx; and when 
the National Anthem came thumping from the 
cinema, the original Ark might have sunk under 
such a boarding-party of thirsty tea-drinkers as 
we had still to receive. I noted that they called 
it tea regardless of the contents of the urn, which 
changed first to coffee and then to cocoa as the 
night wore on : tea was the generic term. 

At last the smarter and tarter of the two order- 
lies, he who compounded the contents of the urns, 
sidled without ceremony to the commander's el- 
bow. 

"It wants a minute to the 'alf-hour, sir.'' 

Gramophone alone could give the husky tone of 
chronic injury, palette and brush the red eyes of 
resentment turned upon his kind beyond the coun- 
ter. Our leader consulted his wrist-watch with a 
brisk gesture. 

"I'll serve the next six men," he ultimated, and 
the seventh man knocked at his heart in vain. 
Green curtains closed the counter in the wistful 
faces of the rest; if I can see them still, it is the 
heavenly music of those curtain-rings that I hear! 
The mind's eye peeps through once more, and spies 
the last gobblers at the splashed tables littered 
with mugs and empty tins; the last dawdlers on a 
floor ankle-deep in the envelopes of twopenny and 
half- franc packets of biscuits; and a little man 
broom-in-hand at the open door, spoiling to sweep 
all the lot into outer darkness! 

In the kitchen, while both orderlies fell straight 
to work upon this Augean scene, our versatile 
leader, as little daunted by the hour, gave further 



10 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

expression to his personality in an omelette worthy 
of the country, and in lashings of Suchard cocoa 
made with a master hand. I remember with much 
gratitude that he also made my yawning bed, and 
that we turned in early to the tune of rain : 

A fusillade upon the roof, 
A tattoo on the pane. 

Only the pane was canvas, and the fusillade 
accompanied by some local music from the guns 
outside the town. 

A Handful of Men 

As "the true love-story commences at the altar," 
so the real work of a hut only begins at the coun- 
ter. You may turn out to be the disguised prince 
of salesmen, and yet fail to deliver the goods that 
really matter. I am not thinking of "goody" 
goods at all, but of the worker's personality such 
as it may be. It is not more essential for an actor 
to "get across the footlights" than it is for the 
Y.M.C.A. counter-jumper to start by clearing that 
obstacle, and mixing with the men for all he can 
show himself to be worth. 

The Ark was such a busy canteen that all this 
is easier said than it was done. Every morning 
we were kept at it as continuously from eleven to 
one as ever we were from four-thirty to eight- 
thirty. Those were our business hours; and though 
it was never quite such fierce shopping in the 
forenoon it was then that the leader would go 
off in quest of fresh supplies, and I was apt to be 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 11 

left in charge. This happened my very first morn- 
ing. Shall I ever forget the intimidating multi- 
tude of Army boots seen under the door before we 
opened ! And there was another of the early days 
when the Somersets stormed our parapet in full 
fighting paraphernalia, with only me to stand up 
to them. Not much chance of foregathering then ; 
but never an hour, seldom a single transaction 
within the hour, but brought me from the other 
side some quaint remark, some adorable display 
of patience, courtesy, or homely fun. The change 
difficulty was chronic, and mutually most exas- 
perating; it was over that stile the men were al- 
ways helping each other or helping me, with 
never a trace of the irritation I felt myself. They 
were the most delightful customers one could 
wish to serve. But that made it the more tan- 
talising to have but a word with them on business. 
My young chief was once more my better here; he 
had only to be behind the counter to "get across" 
as much as he liked, and in as few words. But 
I required a slack half -hour when I could take my 
pipe down the hut and seek out some solitary, or 
make overtures to the man at the piano. 

It was generally the man's chum who responded 
in the first instance; for every iEneas in the new 
legions has his staunch Achates, who collects the 
praise as for the firm, adding his own mite in a 
beaming whisper. "He has his own choir in Edin- 
burgh," said one Jock of another who was playing 
and singing the Scottish songs with urgent power. 
The piano is the surest touchstone in a hut. It 
brings out the man of talent — ^but also the bore 



12 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOHER 

who hammers with one thick-skinned finger — ^but 
also the prevailing lenience that puts up with 
the bore. I have been entreated to keep my 
piano locked and the key in the till; and once on 
the counter I found an anonymous notice, with 
a line requesting me to affix it to the instrument 
without delay: "If you do play, do play — if you 
don't play, don't!" But a pianist of any preten- 
sions has a crowd round him in a minute; and 
a splendid little audience it always is. The set 
concert, as I heard it, was not a patch on these 
unpremeditated recitals. 

One night the hut was full of Riflemen, one of 
whom was strumming away to his own content- 
ment, but with only the usual trusty chum for 
audience. I brought my pipe to the other side 
of the piano, and the performer got up and talked 
across to me for nearly an hour. He was a dark 
little garrulous fellow of no distinction, and he 
talked best with his eyes upon the keyboard, but 
the chum's broad grin of eager admiration never 
ceased to ply between us. The little Rifleman had 
borne a charmed hfe indeed, especially on Pas- 
schendaele Ridge, the scene of his latest misad- 
ventures. He was as idiomatic as Ortheris in his 
generation, but I only remember: "I looked a 
fair Bairnsfather, not 'alf 1" He was the nearest 
approach to a "Bairnsfather" I ever encountered 
in the flesh, but the compliment to the draughts- 
man is no smaller for that. A third Rifleman, less 
demonstratively uncritical than the chum, joined 
the party; and at the end I ventured to ask all 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 13 

three in turn what they had been doing before 
the war. 

"I," said the little man, "was a house-painter 
at Crewe." 

"And I," said the grinning chum, "was conduc- 
tor of a 28 motor-'bus. I expect we've often 
dropped you at the Y.M.C.A. in Tottenham Court 
Road, sir." 

"And you?"— I turned to the last comer— "if 
it isn't a rude question?" 

"Oh, I," said he, with the pride that would con- 
ceal itself, "I'm in the building line. But I oper- 
ate a bioscope at night!" 

The historic present put his attitude in a nut- 
shell. He might have been operating that bio- 
scope the night before, be due back the next, and 
just having a look at things in France on his night 
off. His expert eye was not perceptibly impressed 
with the spectacle of war as he was seeing it off 
the films; but the house-painter seemed to be 
making the most of his long holiday from house- 
painting, and my old friend the conductor did not 
sigh in my hearing for his 28. 

I took the party back with me to the counter, 
where they honoured me by partaking of cocoa 
and biscuits as my guests. It was all there was 
to do for three such hardy and mature philoso- 
phers; and I never saw or heard of them again, 
long as their cap-badge set me looking for one 
or other of their pleasant faces underneath. It 
was always rather sad when we had made friends 
with a man who never came near us again. In 
times of heavy fighting it was no wonder^ but iw 



14 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWEB 

the winter it seemed in the nature of a black mark 
against the hut. 

There were two other Riflemen who were in 
that night, and hit me harder in a softer spot. 
They were both tragically young, one of them a 
pretty boy in a muffler that might have been knit- 
ted by any mother in the land. They were not 
enjoying their war, these two, but they smiled 
none the less as they let it out; they had come in 
of their own free will, as soon as ever their ten- 
der years allowed, and survived all the carnage 
of the Somme and of Passchendaele. They could 
afford to smile; but they had also outlived their 
romantic notions of a war, and were too young to 
bear it willingly in any other spirit. They had 
honest shudders for the horrors they had seen, 
and they frankly loathed going back into the mud 
or ice of the December trenches. 

"Every time," said the pretty boy, as they took 
cocoa with me, "it seems worse." 

"But for the Y.M.C.A.," said the other, with 
simple feeling, "I believe I should have gone 
mad." 

That was something to hear. But what waa 
there to say to such a pair? One had been a clerk 
in Huddersfield; the other, a shade less gentle, 
but, to equalise the appeal, an only child, fore- 
man of some works in Derbyshire. Indubitably 
they were both wishing themselves back in their 
old situations; but equally without a doubt they 
were both still proud of the act of sacrifice which 
had brought them to this. The last was the frame 
of mind to recall by hook or crook. One can be 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 15 

proud of such boys, even if their spirit is not all 
it was, and so perhaps make them prouder of 
themselves; the hard case is the man who waited 
for compulsion, who has no old embers of loyalty 
or enterprise to coax into a modest flame. This 
type takes a lot of waking up, and yet, like other 
heavy sleepers, once awake, may do as well as 
any. 

At the foot of our hut, beyond piano, billiard- 
table, and platform (only the case the billiard- 
table had come in), was the Quiet Room in which 
the men were entitled to read and write without 
interruption. One of those first nights I peeped 
in there with my pipe, at a moment of four- 
fold psychology. 

In one corner two men were engaged in some 
form of violent prayer or intercession ; not on their 
knees, but seated side by side. One, and he much 
the younger of the two, appeared to be wrestling 
for the other's soul, to be at all but physical grips 
with some concrete devil of his inner vision; at 
any rate he was making a noise that entirely de- 
stroyed the character of our Quiet Room. But the 
other occupants, so far from complaining, seemed 
equally wrapped up in their own affairs, and ob- 
livious to the pother. The third man was writing 
a tremendous letter, at great speed, face and 
hands and flying pencil strongly lighted by a can- 
dle-end almost under his nose, more shame for 
our poor lamplight! The fourth and last of the 
party, a good-looking Guardsman with a puzzled 
frown, poising the pencil of an unready scribe, at 
once invoked my aid in another form of literary 



16 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

enterprise. He was making his will in his field 
pocket-book; could I tell him how to spell the 
pretty name of one of his little daughters? Would 
I mind looking it all over, and seeing if it would 
do? 

"Going up the Line for the first time on Tues- 
day/' he explained, "and it's as well to be pre- 
pared.'' 

He was perfectly calm about it. He had thought 
of everything; his wife, I remember, was to have 
"the float and the two horses, to do the best she 
pan with"; but the little girls were specifically 
remembered, and the identity of each clinched by 
their surname after the one that took more spell- 
ing. A dairyman, I imagined from his mild phleg- 
matic face; but it seemed he was the village butch- 
er somewhere in Leicestershire. His date of en- 
rolment bespoke either the conscript or the elev- 
enth-hour volunteer, and his sad air made me de- 
cide which in my own mind. He had obviously no 
stomach for the trenches, but on the other hand 
he showed no fear. It was the kind of passive 
courage I longed to fan into enthusiasm, buti 
knew I never could. I am glad I had not the im- 
pertinence to try. Two or three weeks later, I 
found myself serving a delightfully gay and jaunty 
Guardsman, in whom I suddenly recognised my 
friend. 

"Come back all right, then?" I could only say. 

"Rather!" said he, with schoolboy gusto. He 
was another being; the trenches themselves had 
wrought the change. I would not put a V.C. 
past that butcher if he is still alive, or past any 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 17 

other tardy patriot for that matter. Patriotism 
is a ray of inner light, and may never even come 
to a glow of carnal courage; on .the other hand, 
it is the greatest mistake to impute cowardice to 
the shirker. Selfishness is oftener the restrain- 
ing power, insensibility oftener still. After all, 
even in the officer class, it was not everybody who 
could see that personal considerations ceased to 
exist on the day war broke out. This busy butcher 
had been a fine man all the time, and not unnat- 
urally taken up with the price of sheep, the tricks 
of the weather, the wife and the little girls. May 
the float and the two horses yet be his to drive 
more furiously than of old! 

A few nights later still, and the pretty ex-clerk 
was smiling through his collar of soft muffler 
across the counter. He, too, had made his tour 
without disaster, or as much discomfort as he 
feared, and so had his chum the whilom fore- 
man. These reunions were always a delight to 
me, sometimes a profound reassurance and relief. 
But those first three jolly Riflemen had vanished 
from my ken, and I wish I knew their fate. 

Sunday on Board 

I see from my diary it was on a Sunday night I 
found that memorable quartette so diversely em- 
ployed in our Quiet Room. So, after all, there 
had been something to lead up to the most singu- 
lar feature of the scene. Sunday is Sunday in a 
Y.M.C.A. hut, and in ours it was no more a day of 
rest than it is in any regular place of worship; 



18 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

for that is exactly what we were privileged to pro- 
vide for a very famous Division whose headquar- 
ters were then in our immediate neighbourhood. 

Overnight the orderlies would work late arrang- 
ing the chairs church-fashion, moving the billiard- 
table, and preparing the platform for a succession 
of morning services. These might begin with a 
celebration of the Holy Communion at nine, to be 
followed by a C. of E. parade service at ten and 
one for mixed Nonconformists, or possibly for 
Presbyterians only, at eleven ; the order might be 
reversed, and the opening celebration was not in- 
evitable; but the preparations were the same for 
all denominations and all degrees of ceremonial. 

In a secular sense the hut was closed all morn- 
ing. But in our private precincts those Sabbaths 
were not so easy to observe. The free forenoon 
was too good a chance to count the week's takings, 
amounting in a busy canteen like ours to several 
thousand francs; this took even a quick hand all 
his time, what with the small foul notes that first 
defied the naked eye, and then fell to shreds be- 
tween the fingers; and often have I watched my 
gay young leader, his confidence ruffled by an 
alien frown, slaving like a miser between a cross- 
fire of stentorian hymns. For the cinema, ever our 
rival, was in similar request between the same 
hours; and we were lucky if the selfsame hymn, 
in different keys and stages, did not smite simul- 
taneously upon either ear. 

On a Sunday afternoon we opened at four in- 
stead of half-past, and drove a profane trade as 
merrily as in tiie week until the hut service at six- 



AN ABK IN THE MUD 19 

thirty. During service the counter was closed; 
and after service, in our hut, we drew a firm line 
at tea and biscuits for what was left of the work- 
ing night. 

Neither of ourselves being ordained of any de- 
nomination, we as a rule requisitioned one of the 
many ministers among the Y.M.C.A. workers in 
our district to preach the sermon and offer up the 
prayers: almost invariably he was the shepherd 
of some Nonconformist fold at home, and a 
speaker bom or made. But the men themselves 
set matters going, congregating at the platform 
end and singing hymns — their favourite hymns — 
not many of them mine — for a good half-hour be- 
fore the pastor was due to appear. Of course, 
only a proportion of those present joined in; but 
it was a surprising proportion ; and the uncritical 
forbearance of those who did not take part used 
to impress me quite as much as the unflinching 
fervour of those who did. But, then, it is not too 
soon to say that in all my months in an Army area 
I never once saw or heard Religion, in any shape 
or form, flouted by look or word. 

The hymns were always started by the same 
man, a spectacled N.C.O. in a Red Cross unit, with 
a personality worthy of his stripes. I think he 
must have been a street preacher before the war; 
at any rate he used to get leave to hold a service 
of his own on Tuesday evenings, and I have lis- 
tened to his sermon more than once. Indeed, it 
was impossible not to listen, every rasping word 
of the uncompromising harangue being more than 
audible at our end of the hut, no matter what we 



20 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

were doing. The man had an astounding flow 
of spiritual invective, at due distance the very 
drum-fire of withering anathema, but sorry stuff 
of a familiar order at close range. It was impos- 
sible not to respect this red-hot gospeller, who 
knew neither fear nor doubt, nor the base art of 
mincing words; and he had a strong following 
among the men, who seemed to enjoy his on- 
slaughts, whether they took them to heart or not. 
But I liked him better on a Sunday evening, when 
his fiery spirit was content to "warm the stage'' 
for some meek minister by a preliminary service 
of right hearty song. 

But those ministers were wonders in their way; 
not a man of them so meek upon the platform, nor 
one but had the knack of fluent, pointed, and 
courageous speech. They spoke without notes, 
from the break of the platform, like tight-sleeved 
conjurors; and they spoke from their hearts to 
many that beat the faster for their words. In 
that congregation there were no loath members; 
only those who liked need sit and listen ; the rest 
were free to follow their own devices, within cer- 
tain necessary limitations. The counter, to be 
sure, had those green curtains drawn across it 
for the nonce. But all at that end of the hut were 
welcome as ever to their game of draughts, their 
cigarettes and newspapers, even their murmur of 
conversation. It generally happened, however, 
that the murmur died away as the preacher 
warmed to his work, and the bulk of the address 
was followed in attentive silence by all present. 
I used to think this a greater than any pulpit tri- 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 21 

umph ever won ; and when it was all over, and the 
closing hymn had been sung with redoubled fer- 
vour, a knot of friendly faces would waylay the 
minister on his passage up the hut. 

And yet how much of his success was due to the 
sensitive response of these simple-hearted, uncom- 
plaining travellers in the valley of Death! No 
work of man is easier to criticise than a sermon, 
no sort of criticism cheaper or maybe in poorer 
taste; and yet I have felt, with all envy of their 
gift and their sincerity, that even these powerful 
preachers were, many of them, missing their great 
opportunity, missing the obvious point. Morality 
was too much their watchword, Sin the too fre- 
quent burden of their eloquence. It is not as 
sinners that we should view the men who are 
fighting for us in the great war against interna- 
tional sin. They are soldiers of Christ, if ever 
such drew sword; then let them contemplate the 
love of Christ, and its human reflex in their own 
heroic hearts, not the cleft in the hoof of all who 
walk this earth ! That, and the grateful love we 
also bear them, who cannot fight ourselves, seem 
to me the gist of war-time Christianity : that, and 
the immortality of the soul they may be rendering 
up at any moment for our sake and for His. 

It is hateful to think of these great men in the 
light of their little sins. What thistledown to 
weigh against their noble sacrifice! Yet there 
are those who expatiate on soldiers' sins as though 
the same men had never committed any in their 
unregenerate civil state, before putting hand to 
the redemption of the world; who would charge 



22 NOTES OF A GAMP-FOLLOWER 

every frailty to the war's account, as if vice had 
not flourished, to common knowledge, and the 
despair of generations, in idyllic villages un- 
touched by any previous war, and run like a poi- 
soned vein through all the culture of our towns. 
The point is not that the worst has still to be 
eradicated out of poor human nature, but that 
the best as we know it now is better than the best 
we dared to dream in happier days. 

Such little sins as they denounce, and ask to 
be forgiven in the sinner's name! Bad language, 
for one; as if the low thoughtless word should 
seriously belittle the high deliberate deed! The 
decencies of language let us by all manner of 
means observe, but as decencies, not as virtues 
without which a man shall not enter the King- 
dom of Heaven. Taste is the bed-rock of this 
matter, and what is harmless at one's own fire- 
side might well empty a public hall and put the 
police in possession. To stigmatise mere coarse- 
ness of speech as a first-class sin is to defeat an 
admirable end by the unwitting importation of a 
false yet not unnatural glamour. 

The thing does matter, because the modem 
soldier is less "full of strange oaths" than of cer- 
tain fagons de parler which must not be suffered 
to pass into the currency of the village ale-house 
after the war. They are base coin, very; but still 
the primary offence is against manners, not 
morals, and public opinion, not pulpit admoni- 
tion, is the thing to put it down. 

In a Y.M.C.A. hut the wise worker will not hear 
very much more than he is meant to hear; but 



AN ARK IN THE MUD 23 

there are times when only a coward or a fool 
would hold his own tongue, and that is when an 
ounce of tact is worth a ton of virtue. It is well 
to consider every minute what the men are going 
through, how entirely the refining influence of 
their womankind has passed out of their lives, and 
how noticeably far from impropriety are the 
thoughts that clothe themselves in this grotesque 
and hateful habit of speech. 

Let me close a tender topic with the last word 
thereon, as spoken by a Canadian from Vimy 
Ridge, who came into my hut (months later, when 
I had one of my own) but slightly sober, yet more 
so than his friends, with whom remonstrance be- 
came imperative. 

"I say! I say!" one had to call down from the 
counter. "The language is getting pretty thick 
down there!" 

"Beg pardon, sir. Very sorry," said my least 
inebriated friend, at once ; then, after a mementos 
thought — "But the Shells is pretty thick where 
we come from!" 

It was a better answer than he knew. 



BOND AND FREE 
(The Bapaume Road, March, 1917). 

Misty and pale the sunlight, brittle and black the 

trees; 
Eoads powdered like sticks of candy for a car to crush 

as they freeze . . . 
Then we overtook a Battalion . , . and it wasn't a 

roadway then. 
But cymbals and drums and dulcimers to the beat of 

the marching w.en! 

They were laden and groomed for the trenches, they 
were shaven and scrubbed and fed; 

Like the scales of a single Saurian their helmets rip- 
pled ahead; 

Not a sorrowful face beneath them, just the tail of a 
scornful eye 

For the car full of favoured mufti that went quacking 
and quaking by. 

You gloat and take note in your motoring coat, and 

the sights come fast and thick: 
A party of pampered prisoners, toying with shovel 

and pick; 
A town where some of the houses are so many heaps 

of stone, 
And some of them steel anatomies picked clean to the 

buckled bone. 

A road like a pier in a hurricane of mountainous seas 

of mud, 
Where a few trees, whittled to walking-sticks, rose out 

of the frozen flood 

25 



26 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

Like the masts of the sunken villages that might have 

been down below — 
Or blown off the festering face of an earth that God 

himself wouldn't know! 

Not a yard but was part of a shell-hole — not an inch, 

to be more precise — 
And most of the holes held water, and all the water 

was ice: 
They stared at the bleak blue heavens like the glazed 

blue eyes of the slain, 
Till the snow came, shutting them gently, and sheeting 

the slaughtered plain. 

Here a pile of derelict rifles, there a couple of horses 

lay- 
Like rockerless rocking-horses, as wooden of leg as 

they. 
And not much redder of nostril — not anything like so 

grim 
As the slinking ghoul of a lean live cat creeping over 

the crater's rim! 

And behind and beyond and about us were the long 

black Dogs of War, 
With pigmies pulling their tails for them, and making 

the monsters roar 
As they slithered back on their haunches, as they put 

out their flaming tongues. 
And spat a murderous message long leagues from their 

iron lungs! 

They were kennelled in every corner, and some were in 

gay disguise. 
But all kept twitching their muzzles and baying the 

silvery skies! 
A howitzer like a hyena guffawed point-blank at the 

car — 
Tearing the general racket with an absolute aural scar I 



BOND AND FREE 27 

(Could a giant but crack a cable as a stockman cracks 

his whip, 
Or tear up a mile of calico with one unthinkable 

r-r-r-r-rip! 
Could he only squeak a slate-pencil about the size of 

this gun, 
You may get some faint idea of its sound, which is 

those three sounds in one.) 

But certain noises were absent, we looked for some 

sights in vain, 
And I cannot tell you if shrapnel does really descend 

like rain — 
Or Big Stuff burst like a bonfire, or bullets whistle or 

moan; 
But my other figures Fll swear to — if some of 'em aeb 

my own! 



Livid and moist the twilight, heavy with snow the 

trees. 
And a road as of pleated velvet the colour of new 

cream-cheese . . . 
Then we overtook a Battalion . . . amd I'm hunting 

still for the word 
For that gaunt, undaunted, haunted, whitening, 

frightening herd! 

They had done their tour of the trenches, they were 

coated and caked with mud. 
And some of them wore a bandage, and some of them 

wore their blood! 
The gaps in their ranks were many, and none of them 

looked at me . . . 
And I thought of no more vain phrases for the thing 

I was there to see. 
But I felt like a man in a prison van where the rest 

of the world goes Free. 



II 

CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 

Under Fire 

Soon the shy wintry sun was wearing a veil of 
frosted silver. The eye of the moon was on us 
early in the afternoon, ever a little wider open 
and a degree colder in its stare. All one day our 
mud rang like an anvil to the tramp of rubicund 
customers in greatcoats and gloves; and the next 
day they came and went like figures on the fihn 
next-door, silent and outstanding upon a field of 
dazzling snow. 

But behind the counter we had no such sea- 
sonable sights to cheer us; behind the counter, 
mugs washed overnight needed wrenching off their 
shelf, and three waistcoats were none too many. 
In our room, for all the stove that reddened like 
a schoolgirl, and all the stoking that we did last 
thing at night, no amount of sweaters, blankets, 
and miscellaneous wraps was excessive provision 
against the early morning. By dawn, which leant 
like lead against our canvas windows, and poked 
sticks of icy light through a dozen holes and cran- 
nies, the only unfrozen water in the hut was in 
the kitchen boiler and in my own hot-water bottle. 
I made no bones about this trusty friend; it hung 

29 



30 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

all day on a conspicuous nail; and it did not pre- 
vent me from being the first up in the morning, 
any more than modesty shall deter me from trum- 
peting the fact. One of us had to get up to lay 
the stove and light the fire, and it was my chance 
of drawing approximately even with my brisk 
commander. Na competing with his invidious 
energy once he had taken the deck ; but here was 
a march I could count on stealing while he slept 
the sleep of the young. Often I was about before 
the orderlies, and have seen the two rogues lying 
on their backs in the dim light of their kitchen, 
side by side like huge dirty children. As for me, 
blackened and bent double by my exertions, swad- 
dled in fleece lining and other scratch accoutre- 
ments, no doubt I looked the lion grotesque of the 
party; but, by the time the wood crackled and the 
chimney drew, I too had my inner glow. 

So we reached the shortest day; then came a 
break, and for me the Christmas outing of a life- 
time. 

The Y.M.C.A. in that sector had just started 
an outpost of free cheer in the support line. It 
was a new departure, for the winter only, a kind 
of cocoa-kitchen in the trenches, and we were all 
very eager to take our turn as cooks. The post 
was being manned by relays of the workers in our 
area, one at a time and for a week apiece; but at 
Christmas there were to be substantial additions to 
the nightly offering. It was the obvious thing to 
suggest that extra help would be required, and to 
volunteer for the special duty. But one may 
jump at such a chance and yet feel a sneaking 



CHRISTMAS UE .THE LINE 31 

thrill of morbid apprehension, and yet, again, en- 
joy the whole thing the more for that very feel- 
ing. Such was my case as I lit the fire on the 
morning of the 21st of December, foolishly won- 
dering whether I should ever light it again. By 
all accounts our pitch up the Line was none too 
sheltered in any sense, and the severity of the 
weather was not the least intimidating prospect. 
But for forty mortal months I would have given 
my right eye to see trench life with my left; and 
I was still prepared to strike that bargain and 
think it cheap. 

The man already on the spot was coming down 
to take me back with him ; we met at our head- 
quarters over the mid-day meal, by which time 
my romantic experience had begun. I had walked 
the ruined streets in a shrapnel helmet, endeav- 
ouring to look as though it belonged to me, and 
had worn a gas-mask long enough to hope I might 
never have to do so for dear life. The other man 
had been wearing his in a gas-alarm up the line; 
he had also been missed by a sniper, coming down 
the trench that morning; and had much to say 
about a man who had not been missed, but had 
lain, awaiting burial, all the day before on the 
spot where we were to spend our Christmas. . . . 
It was three o'clock and incipient twilight when 
we made a start. 

Our little headquarters Ford 'bus took us the 
first three miles, over the snow of a very famous 
battle-field, not a whole year old in history, to 
the mouth of a valley planted with our guns. 
Alighting here we made as short work of that val- 



32 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

ley as appearances permitted, each with a shifty 
eye for the next shell-hole in case of need; there 
were plenty of them, including some extremely 
late models, but it was not our lot to see the col- 
lection enlarged. Neither had our own batteries 
anything to say over our heads; and presently the 
trenches received us in fair order, if somewhat 
overheated. I speak for myself and that infernal 
fleece lining, which I had buttoned back into its 
proper place. It alone precluded an indecent 
haste. 

But in the trenches we could certainly afford 
to go slower, and I for one was not sorry. It 
was too wonderful to be in them in the flesh. 
They were almost just what I had always pictured 
them; a little narrower, perhaps; and the un- 
broken chain of duck-boards was a feature not 
definitely foreseen; and the printed sign-boards 
had not the expected air of a joke, might rather 
have been put up by order of the London 
County Council. But the extreme narrowness 
was a surprise, and indeed would have taken my 
breath away had I met my match in some places. 
An ordinary gaunt warrior caused me to lean 
hard against my side of the trench, and to apolo- 
gise rather freely as he squeezed past; a file of 
them in leather jerkins, with snow on their toe- 
caps and a twinkle under their steel hat-brims, 
almost tempted me to take a short cut over the 
top. I wondered would I have got very far, or 
dropped straight back into the endless open grave 
of the communication trench. 

Seen from afar, as I knew of old, that was ex- 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 33 

actly what the trenches looked like; but from the 
inside they appeared more solid and rather deeper 
than any grave dug for the dead. The whole thing 
put me more in mind of primitive ship-building — 
the great ribs leaning outwards — flat timbers in 
between — and over all sand-bags and sometimes 
wire-work with the precise effect of bulwarks and 
hammock-netting. Even the mouths of dug-outs 
were not unlike port-holes flush with the deck; 
and many a piquant glimpse we caught in pass- 
ing, bits of faces lit by cigarette-ends, and half- 
sentences or snatches of sardonic song; then the 
trench would twist round a comer into solitude, 
as a country road shakes off a hamlet, and on we 
trudged through the thickening dusk. Once, 
where the sand-bags were lower than I had no- 
ticed, I thought some very small bird had chirped 
behind my head, until the other man turned his 
and smiled. 

"Hear that?" he said. "That was a bullet! 
It's just about where they sniped at me this morn- 
ing." 

I shortened my stick, and crept the rest of the 
way like the oldest inhabitant of those trenches, 
as perhaps I was. 

Casualties 

It was nearly dark when our journey ended at 
one of those sunken roads which make a name for 
themselves on all battle-fields, and duly compli- 
cate the Western Front. Sometimes they cut the 
trench as a level crossing does a street, and then 



34 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

it is not a bad rule to cross as though a train were 
coming. Sometimes it is the trench that inter- 
sects the sunken road; this happened here. We 
squeezed through a gap in the sand-bags, a gap 
exactly like a stile in a stone fence, and from our 
feet the bleak road rose, with a wild effect, into 
the wintry sunset. 

It was a road of some breadth, but all crinkled 
and misshapen in its soiled bandage of frozen 
snow. Palpable shell-holes met a touchy eye for 
them on every side; one, as clean-cut as our pres- 
ent footprints, literally adjoined a little low sand- 
bagged shelter, of much the same dimensions as a 
blackfellow's gunyah in the bush. This inviting 
habitation served as annex to a small enough hut 
at least three times its size; the two cowered end 
to end against the sunken roadside, each roof a bit 
of bank-top in more than camouflage, with real 
grass doing its best to grow in real sods. 

"No," said the other man, "only the second 
half of the hut^s our hut. This first half's a gum- 
boot store. The sand-bagged hutch at the end of 
all thiQgs is where we sleep." 

The three floors were sunk considerably below 
the level of the road, and a sunken track of duck- 
boards outside the semi-detached huts was like 
the bottom of a baby trench. We looked into our 
end; it was colder and darker than the open air, 
but cubes of packing-case and a capacious boiler 
took stark shape in the gloom. 

"I should think we might almost start our fire/ • 
said the other man. "We daren't by daylight, on 
account of the smoke; we should have a shell on us 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 35 

in no time. As it is, we only get waifs and strays 
from their machine-guns; but one took the rim off 
a man's helmet, as neat as you could do it with 
a pair of shears, only last night out here on these 
duck-boards." 

Yet those duck-boards outside the hut were the 
next best cover to the hut itself; accordingly the 
men greatly preferred waiting about in the open 
road, which the said machine-guns could spray at 
pleasure on the chance of laying British dust. So 
I gathered from the other man: so I very soon 
saw for myself. Night had fallen, and at last we 
had lighted our boiler fire, with the help of a raw- 
boned orderly supplied by the battalion of Jocks 
then holding the front line. And the boiler fire 
had retaliated by smoking all thj-ee of us out of 
the hut. 

This was an initial fiasco of each night I was 
there; to it I owe sights that I can still see as 
plain as the paper under my pen, and bits of dia- 
logue and crashes of orchestral gun-fire, madden- 
ingly impossible to reproduce. Are there no 
gramophone records of such things? If not, I 
make a present of the idea to those whom it of- 
ficially concerns. They are as badly needed as any 
films, and might be more easily obtained. 

The frosty moon was now nearly full, and a 
grey-mauve sky, wearing just the one transcendent 
jewel of light, as briUiant in its way as the dense 
blue of equatorial noon. Upon this noble slate 
the group of armed men, waiting about in the road 
above the duck-boards, was drawn in shining out- 
line; silvered rifles slung across coppery leathern 



36 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

shoulders; earthenware mugs turned to silver 
goblets in their hands, and each tilted helmet it- 
self a little fallen moon. A burst of gun-fire, 
and not a helmet turned ; the rat- tat- tat of a ma- 
chine-gun, but no shining shoulder twinkled with 
the tiniest shrug. And yet the devil's orchestra 
might have been tuning up at their feet, under the 
very stage they trod with culpable unconcern. 

Two melodramatic little situations (as they 
seemed to me, but not to them) came about for 
our immediate benefit, and in appropriately quick 
succession as I remember them. A wounded Jock 
figured in each; neither was a serious case; the 
first one too light, it was feared, to score at all. 
The man did just come limping along our duck- 
boards, but only very slightly, though I rather 
think a comrade's arm played a fifth-wheel part in 
the proceedings. It was only a boot that had been 
sliced across the instep. A shoemaker's knife could 
not have made a cleaner job so far; but "a bit 
graze on ma fut" was all the sufferer himself could 
claim, amid a murmur of sympathy that seemed 
exaggerated, ill as it became a civilian even to 
think so. 

The other casualty was a palpable hit in the 
fore-arm. First aid had been applied, including 
an empty sand-bag as top bandage, before the 
wounded man appeared with his escort in the 
moonlight; but now there was a perverse short- 
age of that very commiseration which had been 
lavished upon the man with the wounded boot. 
This was a real wound, "a blighty one" and its 
own reward: the man who could time matters 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 37 

to so cynical a nicety with regard to Christ- 
mas, and then only "get it in the arrum," 
which notoriously means a long time rather than 
a bad one, was obviously not a man to be pitied. 
He was a person to be plied with the dryest 
brand of North British persiflage. Signs of grim 
envy did not spoil the joke, for there were those 
of as grim a magnanimity behind it all; and the 
pale lad himself, taking their nonsense in the best 
of part, yet shyly as though they had a right to 
complain, and he only wished they could all have 
been wounded and sent home together, was their 
match in simple subtlety and hidden kindness. 
And between them all they were better worth see- 
ing and hearing than the moonlight and the guns. 

It is easy to make too much of a trifle that was 
not one to me, but in a sense my first casualty, 
almost a poignant experience. But there are no 
trifles in the trenches in the dead of winter; there 
is not enough happening; everything that does 
happen is magnified accordingly; and the one man 
hit on a quiet day is a greater celebrity than the 
last survivor of his platoon in the day of big 
things. The one man gets an audience, and the 
audience has time to think twice about him. 

In the same way nothing casts a heavier gloom 
than an isolated death in action, such as the one 
which had occurred here only the previous day. 
All ranks were still talking about the man who 
had lain unburied where his comrades were now 
laughing in the moonlight; detail upon detail 
I heard before the night was out, and all had the 
pathos of the isolated case, the vividness of a 



38 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

portrait as against a group. The man had been 
a Lewis gunner, and he had died flushed with the 
crowning success of his career. That was the con- 
soling detail: in his last week on earth, in full view 
of friend and foe, he had brought off the kind of 
shot a whole battalion boasts about. His bird 
still lay on No-Man's Land, a jumble of wire and 
mangled planes; not the sight to sober a success- 
ful sportsman, and him further elated by the 
promise of special and immediate leave. No time 
for a lad of his mettle to weary of well-doing; and 
he knew of a sniper worth adding to his bag. 
The sniper, however, would seem to have known 
of him, and in the ensuing duel took special care 
of himself. Not so the swollen-hearted sportsman 
who was gping on leave and meant earning it. 
Many shots had been exchanged without result; 
at last, unable to bear it any longer, our poor man 
had leapt upon the parapet, only to drop back 
like a stone, shot dead not by the other duellist 
but by a second sniper posted elsewhere for the 
purpose. And this tragically ordinary tragedy 
was all the talk that night over the mugs. Grim 
snatches linger. One quite sorrowful chum re- 
gretted the other's braces, buried with him and 
of all things the most useless in a grave, and he 
himself in need of a new pair. It did seem as 
though he might have taken them off the body, 
and with the flown spirit's hearty sanction. 

They did not say where they had buried him, 
but our sunken roadside was not without its own 
wooden cross of older standing. It was the tiniest 
and flimsiest I ever saw, and yet it had stood 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 39 

through other days, when the road was in other 
hands; those other hands must have put it up. 
"An Unknown British Hero of the R.F.A." was all 
the legend they had left to endure with this ironi- 
cal tenacity. 

About midnight we came to an end of our water, 
supplied each morning by a working-party de- 
tailed for the job: with more water we might 
have done worse than keep open all night and kill 
the bitter day with sleep. As it was, we were soon 
creeping through a man-hole curtained by a frozen 
blanket into the corrugated core of the sand- 
bagged gunyah. It was as much as elbow-high 
down the middle of the span ; the beds were side 
by side, so close together that we had to get in by 
the foot, and only for a wager would I have at- 
tempted to undress in the space remaining. 

But not for any money on such a night ! A par- 
ticularly feeble oil-stove, but all we had to warm 
the hut by day, had been doing what it could for 
us here at the eleventh hour; but all it had done 
was to stud the roof with beads of moisture and 
draw the damp out of the blankets. We got be- 
tween them in everything except our boots; even 
trench-coats were not discarded, nor fleece lin- 
ings any longer to be despised. The other man 
was soon asleep. But I had provided myself with 
appropriate reading, and for some time burnt a 
candle to old James Grant and The Romance of 
War. 

There are those who delight in declaring there 
is no romance in this war; there was enough for 
me that night. Not many inches from my side 



40 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

the nearest shell had burst, not many days ago 
by some miracle, without blowing in a sand-bag; 
not many inches from my head, and perhaps no 
deeper in the earth, lay the skull of our "un- 
known hero of the R.F.A." I, for one, did not 
sleep the worse for his honoured company, or for 
pur common lullaby the guns. 



An Interrupted Lunch 

But there was another side to our life up the 
line, thanks to the regal hospitality of Battalion 
Headquarters. Thither we were bidden to all 
meals, and there we presented ourselves with fe- 
verish punctuality at least three times a day. 

It was only about a minute's walk along the 
trench, past more dug-outs lit by cigarette-ends, 
past a trench store-cupboard quietly labelled 
BOMBS, and a sentry in a sand-bagged cul-de- 
sac. The door at which we knocked was no more 
imposing than our own, the sanctuary within no 
roomier, but like the deck-house of a well-ap- 
pointed yacht after a tramp's forecastle. Art- 
green walls and fixed settees, a narrow table, all 
spotless napery and sparkling glass, forks and 
spoons as brilliant as a wedding-present, all these 
were there, or I have dreamt them. I would even 
swear to flowers on the table, if it were a case of 
swearing one way or other. But what they gave 
us to eat, with two exceptions, I cannot in the 
least remember; it was immaterial in that atmos- 
phere and company, though I recall the other 
man's bated breathings on the point. My two ex- 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 41 

ceptions were porridge at breakfast and scones at 
tea; both were as authentic as the mess-waiter's 
speech ; and it would not have surprised me if the 
porridge had been followed by trout from the bum, 
so much was that part of the Line just then a 
part of Scotland. 

It was a genial atmosphere in more ways than 
one. Always on coming in one's spectacles turned 
to ground-glass and one's out-door harness to mol- 
ten lead. The heat came up an open stairway 
from the bowels of the earth, as did the chimney 
which I painfully mistook for a hand-rail the first 
night, when the Colonel was kind enough to take 
me down below. It was the first deep dug-out I 
had seen in working order, and it seemed to me de- 
liciously safe and snug; the officers' berths in fas- 
cinating tiers, again as on shipboard, all but the 
Colonel's own, by itself at one end. It made me 
very jealous, yet rather proud, when I thought of 
our freezing lair upon the sunken road. 

Then, before we went, he took me up to an 
O.P. on top of all. I think we climbed up to it 
out of the cul-de-sac, and I know I cowered be- 
hind a chunk of parapet; but what I remember 
best is the zig-zag labyrinth in the foreground, that 
unending open grave with upturned earth com- 
plete, yet quiet as any that ever was filled in; 
and then the wide sweep of moonlit snow, enemy 
country nearly all, but at the moment still and 
peaceful as an arctic floe. Our own trenches, the 
only solid signs of war, like the properties in front 
of a panorama; not a shot or a sound to give the 
rest more substance than a painted back-cloth. It 



42 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

was one of those dead pauses that occur on all but 
the noisiest nights, and make the whole war no- 
where more unreal than on the battle-field. 

But when the very next day was at its quietest 
we had just the opposite experience. We were sit- 
ting at luncheon in this friendly mess, and the 
guns might have been a thousand miles away until 
they struck up all at once, like a musical-box in 
the middle of a tune. Their guns, this time ; but 
you would not have thought it from the faces 
round the table. One or two exchanged glances; a 
lifted eyebrow was answered by a smile ; but the 
conversation went on just the same until the of- 
ficer nearest the door withdrew detachedly. New 
subject no longer avoidable, but treated with be- 
coming levity. Not a bombardment, just a Strafe, 
we gathered ; it might have been with blank shell, 
had we not heard them bursting. Exit another 
officer; enter man from below. Something like 
telegram in his hand: retaliation requested by 
front line. 'Tut it through to Brigade." Fur- 
ther retirements from board; less noise for mo- 
ment. New sound: enemy ^plane over us, see- 
ing what theyVe done. New row next door: 
our machine-guns on enemy 'plane! New note in 
distance: retaliation to esteemed order. . . . 
Other man and I alone at table, dying to go out 
and see fun, but obviously not our place. And 
then in a minute it is all over, not quite as quick- 
ly as it began, but getting on that way. Strafe 
stopped: 'plane buzzing away again: machine- 
guns giving it up as a bad job: cheery return of 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 43 

Belisarii, in the order of their going, Colonel last 
and cheeriest of all. 

^'Had my hair parted by a whizz-bang," says 
he, "up in that O.P. we were in last night." 

And, as he replenished a modest cup, the curtain 
might have fallen on the only line I remember in 
the whole impromptu piece, which could not have 
played quicker as a music-hall sketch, or held a 
packed audience more entranced than the two 
civilian supers who had the luck to be on the 
stage. 

But we had to pay for our entertainment; for 
although it turned out to have been an absolutely 
bloodless Strafe, yet a portion of our parapet had 
been blown in, which made it inexpedient for us 
to go round the front line that afternoon, as pre- 
viously arranged by our indulgent hosts. In the 
evening they were going into reserve, and another 
famous Regiment coming to "take over." The 
newcomers, however, were just as good to us in 
their turn ; and the new Colonel so kind as to take 
me round himself on Christmas morning. 

Christmas Day 

The tiny hut is an abode of darkness made vis- 
ible by a single candle, mounted in its own grease 
in the worst available position for giving light, 
lest the opening of the door cast the faintest beam 
into the sunken road outside. On the shelf flush 
with the door glimmer parental urns with a large 
family of condensed-milk tins, opened and un- 
opened, full and empty; packing-cases in simi- 



44 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

lar stages litter the duck-board flooring, or pile 
it wall-high in the background ; trench-coats, gas- 
masks, haversacks and helmets hang from nails or 
repose on a ledge of the inner wall, which is sunk- 
en roadside naked and unashamed. Two weary- 
figures cower over the boiler fire; they are the 
other man and yet another who has come up for 
the night. A third person, who may look more 
like me than I feel like him, hovers behind them, 
smoking and peering at his watch. It is the last 
few minutes of Christmas Eve, and for a long 
hour there has been little or nothing doing. Ear- 
lier in the evening, from seven or so onwards, there 
seemed no end to the queue of armed men, call- 
ing for their mug of cocoa and their packet of bis- 
cuits, either singly, each for himself, or with dixies 
and sandbags to be filled for comrades on duty 
in the trenches. 

The quiet has been broken only by the sibilant 
song of the boiler, by desultory conversation and 
bursts of gunfire as spasmodic and inconsequent. 
Often a machine-gun has beaten a brief but furi- 
ous tattoo on the doors of darkness; but now come 
clogged and ponderous footfalls — mud to mud on 
the duck-boards leading from the communication 
trench — and a chit is handed in from the outer 
moonlight. 

"24—12—17. 
"To Y.M.C. A. Canteen, 

<« Avenue. 

Dear Sirs, — I will be much obliged if you will 
supply the bearer with hot cocoa (suflScient for 90 
men), which I understand you are good enough to 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 45 

issue to units in this line. The party are taking 2 hot- 
food containers for the purpose. 

"Thanking you in anticipation, 
"I am, Yours faithfully, 
"(Illegible) 

"0/C B Co. 

"1/8 (Undesirable)." 

Torpid trio are busy men once more. Not 
enough cocoa ready-made for ninety; fresh brew 
under way in fewer seconds than it takes to state 
the fact. Third person akeady anchored beside 
open packing-case,, (enormous sand-bag gaping be- 
tween his knees, little sealed packets flying 
through his hands from box to bag in twins and 
triplets. By now it is Christmas morning; cakes 
and cigarettes are forthwith added to statutory bis- 
cuits, and a sack is what is wanted. Third person 
makes shift with second sand-bag, which having 
filled, he leaves his colleagues working like benev- 
olent fiends in the steam of fragrant cauldrons, 
and joins the group outside among the sheU-holes. 

They are consuming interim dividends of the 
nightly fare, as they stand about in steely silhou- 
ette against the shrouded moonlight. The scene 
is not quite so picturesque as it was last night, 
when no star of heaven could live in the light of 
the frosty moon, and every helmet was a shining 
halo ; to-night the only twinkle to be seen is under 
a helmet^s rim. 

"Merry Christmas, sir, an' many of 'em," says 
a Tyneside voice, getting in the first shot of a 
severe bombardment. The third person retaliates 
with appropriate spirit; the interchange could 



46 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

not have been franker or heartier in the days of 
actual peace on earth and apparent good-will 
among men. But here they both are for a Uttle 
space this Christmas morning. Cannon may drum 
it in with thunderous irony, and some corner-man 
behind a machine-gun oblige with what sounds 
exactly like a solo on the bones, but here in the 
midst of those familiar alarms the Spirit of Christ- 
mas is abroad on the battle-field. He may be 
frightened away — or become a casualty — at any 
moment. One lucky flourish with the bones, one 
more addition to these sharp-edged shell-holes, 
and how many of the party would have a groan 
left in him? One of them groans in spirit as he 
thinks, never so vividly, of countless groups as 
full of gay vitality as this one, blown out of exis- 
tence in a bhnding flash. But his hardy friends 
are above such morbid imaginings; the cold ap- 
pears to be their only trouble, and of it they make 
light enough as they stamp their feet. Some are 
sea-booted in sand-bags, and what with their 
jerkins and low, round helmets, look more like 
a watch in oilskins and sou'-westers than a party 
of infantry. 

"We nevaw died o* wintaw yet," says the Tyne- 
sider. "It takes a lot to kill an old soljaw." But 
he owns he was a shipyard hand before the war; 
and not one of them was in the Army. 

All hope it is the last Christmas of the war, 
but the Tyneside prognostication of "anothaw ten 
yeaws" is received with perfect equanimity. There 
is general agreement, too, when the same oracle 
dismisses the latest peace offer as "blooff.'' But 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 47 

it must be confessed that articulate ardour is 
slightly damped until somebody starts a subject 
a great deal nearer home. 

"Who'd have thought that we should live to 
see a Y.M. in the support line!'' 

Flattering echoes from entire group. 

"Do you remember that chap who kept us all 
awake in barracks, talking of it?" 

"I nevaw believed him. I thought it was a 
myth, sir. And nothing to pay an' all ! It must be 
costing the Y.M. a canny bit o' money, sir?" 

The third person — who has been hovering on 
the verge of the inveterate first — only commits 
himself to the statement that he helped to give 
away 785 cups of cocoa and packets of biscuits 
the night before. Rapid calculations ensue. 
"Why, that must be nearly ten pounds a night, 
sir?" 

"Something like that." 

"Heaw that, corporal! An' now it's cigarettes 
an' cakes an' all!" 

But the containers are ready, lids screwed down 
upon their steaming contents. Strong arms hoist 
them upon stronger backs; the plethoric sand-bags 
are shouldered with still less ado, and off go the 
party into the slate-coloured night, off through 
the communication trenches into the firing-line 
they are to hold for England until the twelve hun- 
dred and thirty-ninth daybreak of the war. 

Peering after them with wistful glances, the 
third person relapses altogether into the first. 
Take away the odd two hundred, and for a thou- 
sand days and nights my heart has been where 



48 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

their muffled feet will be treading in another min- 
ute. Yes; a round thousand must be almost the 
exact length of days since I first came out here in 
the spirit, and to stay. But never till this year did 
I seriously dream of following in the flesh, or till 
this moment feel the front line like a ball at my 
feet. Even the day before yesterday the arrange- 
ment was not so definite as it is to-day; it was not 
the Colonel himself who was to have taken us 
round by special favour and appointment. Yet 
how easily, had the Strafe happened half-an-hour 
later than it did, might we not have come in for it, 
perhaps at the very place where the parapet was 
blown down! It would have been a wonderful 
experience, especially as there were no casualties. 
Will anything of the kind happen to-day? I have 
a feeling that something may; but then I have 
had that feeling every sentient moment up the 
Line. And nothing that can come can come amiss; 
that is another of my feelings here, if not the 
strongest of them all. This Christmas morning it 
rings almost like a carol in the heart, almost like 
a peal of Christmas bells — jangled indeed by the 
heart's own bitter flaws, and yet piercing sweet as 
Life itself. 

But for all my elderly civilian excitement, be- 
fore a risk too tiny to enter a young fighting head 
at all, sleep does not fail me on a new couch of my 
own construction. The sand-bagged lair was none 
too dry in the late hard frost; in the unseason- 
able thaw that seems to be setting in, it is no 
place for crabbed age. Youth is welcome to the 
two beds with the water now standing on their 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 49 

india-rubber sheets, and youth seems quite hon- 
estly to prefer them; so I make mine on the bis- 
cuit-boxes in the shed, turn my toes to the still 
glowing coke in the boiler fire, press my soles to 
the hot-water bottle which has distinguished it- 
self by freezing during the day, and huddle down 
as usual in all the indoor and outdoor garments 
I have with me, under my share of the blankets, 
which I have been drying assiduously every eve- 
ning. The Romance of War performs its nightly 
unromantic office . . . and I have had many a 
worse night upon a spring-mattress. Colonel fin- 
ished breakfast when I reached the mess; ready 
for me by the time I have had mine. We glove 
and muffle ourselves, adjust gas-masks "at the 
ready," and sally forth on his common round and 
my high adventure, tapping the still slippery 
duck-boards with our sticks. 

A colourless morning, neither freezing nor thaw- 
ing; visibility probably low, luminosity certainly 
mediocre; in fact, typical Christmas weather of the 
modern realistic school, as against the Christmas 
Number weather of the last ten days. Yet it is 
the Christmas Number atmosphere that haunts 
me as an aura the more tenacious for its utter 
absence on all sides: the sprig of holly in the cake, 
the presents on the table, the joys of parent and 
child — never more at one^ — and blinding visions in 
both capacities, down to that last war-time Christ- 
mas dinner at the Carlton . . . such are the 
sights that await me after all in the front-line 
trench! I have dreamt of it for years, yet now 
that I am here it is of the dead years I dream, or 



50 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

of this Christmas morning anywhere but where it 
is one's beatitude to be -spending it. 

Not that I fail to see a good deal of what is 
before my eyes at last; but never for many yards 
is the trench that we are in the only one I seem to 
see, and a comparison between the two is irresist- 
ible. Perhaps the width and solidity of this 
trench would impress me less if it were not all 
so different from Belgium as I all but knew it 
in 1915; the machine-gunners at their posts in 
the deep bays, like shepherds sheltering behind a 
wall, yet somehow able to see through the wall, 
would stand out less if the fire-step also were 
manned in the old way. But now trenches are 
held more by machinery and by fewer men, at any 
rate, in daytime; and at night men evidently do 
not sleep so near their work as then they did; 
at least, I look in vain for dug-outs in this sector 
of the front line. And I still look in vain for 
trouble, though all the time I feel all sorts of 
possibilities impending: a strange mixture of curi- 
osity and dread it is — ardent curiosity, and quite 
pleasurable dread — that weaves itself into the 
warp of all inward and outward impressions what- 
soever: can it be peculiar to self-ridden civilians, 
or are there really brave men like the Colonel in 
front of me (with a bar to his D.S.O.) who have 
undergone similar sensations at their baptism of 
fire? 

It is not exactly mine; nothing comes anything 
like so near me as that sniper's bullet on the 
way up the other day; but little black bursts 
do keep occurring high overhead, where one of 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 51 

our airmen is playing peep among the clouds. 
The fragments must be falling somewhere in the 
neighbourhood; and a more alarming kind of 
shell has just burst on the high ground between 
our parados and the support line. Not very- 
close — I must have been listening to something 
else — but the Colonel points out the smoking 
place with his stick and his quiet smile. His 
smile is part of him, very quiet and contained, full 
of easy-going power, and a kindness incapable of 
condescension. He might be my country-house 
host pointing out the excellence of his crop, but 
his touch is lighter and I am not expected to ad- 
mire. He is, of all soldiers I ever met, just the 
one I would choose to be alongside if I had to be 
hit. I don^t believe his face would alter very 
much, and I should be dying not to alter it more 
than I could help. 

But, in spite of all interior preparations, it is 
not to be. He has given me a glimpse of No-Man's 
Land, not through a periscope but in a piece of 
ordinary looking-glass; we are nearing the dam- 
aged place where his presence is required and 
mine emphatically is not. Not that he says any- 
thing of the sort, but I see it in his kindly smile 
as he hands me over to his runner for safe-con- 
duct to the place from whence I came. Still as 
much disappointed as relieved, as though a defi- 
nite excitement had been denied to me, I turned 
and went with equal reluctance and alacrity. 

"The bravest officer in the British Army!'' was 
the runner's testimony to our friend. I have 
heard the honest words before, but this hero-wor- 



52 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

shipper had chapter and verse for his creed: "Six 
times he has been wounded in this war, and never 
yet gone back to Blighty for a wound!" 

I had not noticed the six gold stripes — if any — 
but it is not everybody who wears his full allow- 
ance. And if ever I met a man who cared less 
than most brave men about all such things, I be- 
lieve I said good-bye to him last Christmas Day. 

We were to meet again in the evening; in the 
meantime I was to have my Christmas dinner with 
the other Colonel and his merry men, now in re- 
serve. I found them in an ex-Hun dug-out, more 
like a forecastle than the other headquarters ; every- 
thing underground, and the bunks ranged round 
the board; but there was the same sheen on the 
table-cloth, the same glitter of glass and plate, 
the same good cheer and a turkey worthy of the 
day, and a ham worthy of the turkey, and a plum- 
pudding worthy of them both. It is not for the 
guest of a mess to say grace in pubhc; but Christ- 
mas dinner in the trenches is a case apart. As 
the school tag might have had it, non cuivis civi 
talia contingunt. 

There were crackers, too, I suddenly remember, 
and the old idiotic paper caps and mottoes, and 
Christmas cards wherever one went. In the new 
legions there is nearly always some cunning hand 
to supply the unit with a topical Christmas card : 
one of our two Battalions had a beauty, and 
even the Y.M.C.A. made bold to circulate an 
artistic apotheosis of our quarters on the sunken 
road. But those are not the Christmas cards I 
still preserve; my ill-gotten souvenirs are type- 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 53 

written scraps on typewriting-paper, unillus- 
trated, but all the more to the point: *'Best 
wishes for Xmas and Good Luck in 1918, from the 
Brigadier and Staff, — th Infantry Brigade" — 
^'Christmas Greetings and All Good Luck from 
— th Infantry Brigade Headquarters" — "Christ- 
mas Greetings and Good Luck from — th Divi- 
sional Artillery." I must say this kind appealed 
to me, though I sent away a good many of the 
more ambitious variety. In neither was there 
any conventional nonsense about a "happy" or 
even a "merry" Christmas; and that, in view of 
the well-know perversity of the Comic Spirit, may 
have been one reason why so much merriment ac- 
crued. Nor did the contrast between unswerv- 
ing ceremonial and a sardonic simplicity, as shown 
in this matter of the Christmas cards, begin or 
end there; for while I had followed crystal and 
fine table-linen into reserve for my Christmas 
dinner, the hospitable board behind the front line 
was now spread with newspapers, and we drank 
both our whisky-and-soda and our coffee out of 
the same enamelled cup. 

The Colonel who had taken me into the front 
line after breakfast was not at dinner that night; 
for all his wounds he had gone down with com- 
mon influenza, and I was desolated. It was my 
last chance of thanking him, as the other man 
and I were leaving in the early morning. All day 
I had been thinking of all that I had seen, and of 
all I had but foreseen, though so vividly that I 
felt more and more as though I had actually had 
some definite escape; besides, the things I had 



54 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

heard about him after we parted made me covet 
the honour of shaking hands once more with so 
very brave a man. I had my wish. In the mid- 
dle of dinner a servant emerged from below to 
say: 'The Colonel would like to see the Y.M.C.A. 
officer before he went.'' 

I can see him still, as I found him, hot and 
coughing on the bunk in the corner by itself. "I 
thought you would be interested to hear," said 
he, ''that the very minute you left me this morn- 
ing a rum- jar burst on the parados just behind 
me. You know how I wear my helmet, with the 
strap behind? It blew it off." 

So my escape had been fairly definite after all, 
and the thing I was so ready for had really hap- 
pened "the very minute" my back was turned! 
But that, unhappily, is not the whole coincidence. 
Five months later it was written of "this good 
and gallant leader" that "while inspecting his 
battalion in the trenches he was struck by a 
fragment of shell from a trench mortar (i.e., a 
'rum- jar') and killed instantaneously." My pa- 
renthesis; the rest from the Times notice, which 
also bears out the story of the six wounds, 
except that they were seven, and four of them 
earned ("with an immediate award of the D.S.O.") 
on a single occasion. There is more in the notice 
that I should like to quote, more still that I could 
say even on the strength of that one morning's 
work; but who am I to praise so grand a man? I 
only know that I shall never see another Christ- 
mas without seeing that front-line trench, and a 
quiet, dark man in the pride and prime of perfect 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 55 

soldierhood, self-saddled with an old camp-fol- 
lower who felt as a child beside him. 



The Babes in the Trenches 

In the morning we made our tracks in virgin 
snow. It had fallen heavily in the night, and was 
still falling as we turned into the trench. So was 
a light shower of shell; but it blew over; and now 
our good luck seemed almost certain to attend us 
to our journey's end. 

The snow thinned off as we plodded on our way. 
But it had altered and improved the trenches out 
of knowledge, lying thick along the top on either 
hand, and often half-way down the side, so that 
we seemed like Gullivers striding between two 
chains of Lilliputian Alps. It was nevertheless 
hard going in our valley, where the duck-boards 
were snowed under for long stretches without a 
break, and warmer work in my fleece lining than 
I had known it yet. My gas-mask was like a real 
mill-stone round my neck; and though the other 
man had possessed himself of part of my impedi- 
menta, that only made me feel my age the more 
acutely. Almost a great age I felt that morning; 
for nights on packing-cases in a low temperature, 
and an early start on biscuits and condensed-milk 
prepared with cold water, after short commons of 
sleep, are the kind of combination that will find a 
man out. I was not indeed complaining, but 
neither was I as observant as I might have been. 
I had been over this part of the ground by myself 
the day before, on the way to my Christmas din- 



56 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

ner. It did look rather different in the snow, but 
that was to be expected, and the other man knew 
the way welL So I understood, and he emphati- 
cally affirmed the supposition on such provocation 
as I from time to time felt justified in giving the 
voluntary bearer of my pack. It was only when 
we came to some suspiciously unfamiliar land- 
mark, something important (but I honestly for- 
get what) in a bay by itself, that I asserted myself 
sufficiently to call a halt. 

''We never passed that before!^' 

"Oh, yes, we did. I'm sure we did. I think 
I remember it.'' 

That ought not to have satisfied me; but you 
cannot openly discredit a man who insists on 
carrying your pack. I was too fatigued to take it 
from him, and not competent to take the lead. 
On he led me, perspiring my misgivings at every 
pore; but under a tangled bridge of barbed wire I 
made a firmer stand. 

"Anyhow, you don't remember thisT I asserted 
point-blank. 

"No. I can't say I do." 

"Then how do you account for it?" 

"It must have been put up in the night." 

I cannot remember by what further resource of 
casuistry that young man induced me to follow 
him another yard ; yet so it was, and all the shame 
be mine. He himself was the next to falter and 
stand still in his tracks, and finally to face me 
with a question whose effrontery I can still ad- 
mire: 



j| 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 57 

"What would you do if we met a Hun? Put 
your hands up?" 

We were, in fact, once more impinging upon the 
firing line, and by a trench at the time, apparent- 
ly, not much in use. I know it seemed long hours 
since we had encountered a soul; but then it 
might have been for the best part of another hour 
that my guilty guide now left me in order to as- 
certain the worst, and I do not seriously suppose 
it was very many minutes. I remember cooling 
off against the side of the trench, and hearing ab- 
solutely nothing all the time. That I still think 
remarkable. It was not snowing; the sun shone; 
visibility must have been better than for two 
whole days; and yet nothing was happening. I 
might have been waiting in some Highland glen, 
or in a quarry in the wilds of Dartmoor. I think 
that particular silence was as impressive, as in- 
timidating, as the very heaviest firing that I heard 
in all my four months at the front. 

No harm came of our misadventure; it was pos- 
sibly less egregious than it sounds. A wrong turn- 
ing in the snow had taken us perhaps a mile out 
of our way; but a trench mile is a terribly long 
one, and I know how much I should like to add for 
the state of the duck-boards on this occasion, and 
how much more for that of a lame old duck who 
thought they were never, never coming to and 
end! The volley of the guns was nothing after 
them, though the guns were active at the time, 
an anti-aircraft battery taking an academic inter- 
est in a humming speck on high. Beyond the val- 
ley ran the road, and beyond the road the river, 



58 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

where we were to have caught a boat. Of course 
we had just succeeded in missing it. A home- 
ward-bound lorry picked us up at last. And we 
were in plenty of time for the plain mid-day meal 
at our humble headquarters in the town. But by 
then I was done to the world and dead to shame. 
I suppose I have led too soft a life, taking very 
little exercise for its own sake, though occasionally 
going to the other extreme from an ulterior mo- 
tive. So I have been deservedly tired once or 
twice in my time ; but I didn't know what it was 
to be done up before last Boxing Day. 

The short mile down to the hut that afternoon 
was the longest and worst of all. Stiffness was 
setting in, and the snow so deep in the ruinous 
streets; but every yard of the way I looked for- 
ward to my sheetless bed ; and few things in life 
have disappointed me so little. The fire was out; 
it seemed, and was, worth lighting first. There 
was a sensuous joy about that last purely volun- 
tary effort and delay. I even think I waited to let 
my old hot-water bottle share in the triumphal 
entry between blankets that were at least dry, 
plentiful, and soft as a feather-bed after the lids 
of those packing-cases up the Line! 

And it was our Christmas concert in the hut 
that evening: the copious entertainment disturbed 
without spoiling my rest, rather bringing it home 
to every aching inch of me as the heavenly thing 
it was. Song and laughter travelled up the hut, 
and filtered through to me refined and rarefied by 
far more than the little distance. Somebody came 
in and made tea. It was better than being ill. I 



CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE 59 

lay there till nine next morning; then went down 
to the OflScers' Baths, and came out feeling young- 
er than at any period of actual but insensate 
youth. 



FORERUNNERS ♦ 
(1900) 

When I lie dying in my bed, 
A grief to wife, and child, and friend,-^ 

How I shall grudge you gallant dead 
Your sudden, swift, heroic end! 

Dear hands will minister to me. 
Dear eyes denote each shalloiuer breath: 

You had your battle-cries, you three, 
To cheer and charm you to your death. 

You did not wane from worse to worst, 
Under coarse drug or futile knife, 

But in one grand mad moment burst 
From glorious life to glorious Life. . . . 

These twenty years ago and more, 
'Mid purple heather and brown crag. 

Our whole school numbered scarce a score, 
And three have fallen for the Flag. 

You two have finished on one side, 
You who were friend and foe at play; 

Together you have done and died; 
But that was where you learnt the way. 

And the third face! I see it now. 
So delicate and pale and brave. 

The clear grey eye, the unruffled brow, 
Were ripening for a hero's grave. 

H. P. P.— F. M.— J. W. A. C. 

St. Nimian's, Moffat, 1879-1880. 
South Africa, 1899-1900. 

61 



62 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

Ah! gallant three, too young to die, 
The pity of it all endures. 

Yet, in my own poor passing, I 
Shall lie and long for such as yours^ 



Ill 

DETAILS 

Orderly Men- 
He who loves a good novel will find himself in 
clover in a Y.M.C.A. hut at the front. Not that 
he will have much time to read one there, except 
as I read my night-cap The Romance of War; but 
a better book of the same name will never stop 
writing itself out before his eyes, a book all dia- 
logue and illustrations, yet chock-full of marvel- 
lous characters, drawn to a man without a word 
of commentary or analysis. To a man, advisedly, 
since it will be a novel without a heroine; on the 
other hand, all the men and boys will be heroes, 
at any rate to the kind of reader I have in mind. 
Something will depend on him ; he will have to 
apply himself, as much as to any other kind of 
reading. He must have eyes to see, brains to 
translate, a heart to love or pity or admire. He 
must have the power to penetrate under other 
skins, to tremble for them more than for his own, 
to glow and sweat with them, to shiver in shoes 
he is not fit to wear. Many can go as far for 
people who never existed outside some author's 
brain; these are they on whom the most stupen- 
dous of unwritten romances is least likely to be 

63 



64 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWEB 

lost. It lies open to all who care to take their 
stand behind a hut counter in a forward area in 
France. 

The character to be seen there, and to be loved 
at sight! The adventures to be heard at first- 
hand, and sometimes even shared! The fun, the 
pathos, the underlying horror, but the grandeur 
lying deeper yet, all to be encountered together 
at any minute of any working hour! The Ro- 
mance of War it is, but not only the romance; and 
talking of my sedative, with all affection for an 
author who once kept me only too wide awake, it 
was not of him that I thought by day behind my 
counter. It was of Dickens. It was of Hugo* 
It was of Reade, who might have done the best 
battle in British fiction (and did one of the very 
best sea-fights), of Scott and Stevenson and the 
one or two living fathers of families who will die 
as hard as theirs. Their children were always com- 
ing to life before our eyes, especially the Dickens 
progeny. Sapper Pinch was a friend of mine, with 
one or two near relations in the R.A.M.C. There 
were several Private Tapleys, and not one of them 
a bore; on the contrary, they were worth their 
weight in gold. And there was an older man whose 
real name was obviously Sikes, though the worst 
thing we knew about him was that he smoked an 
ounce of Nosegay every day he was down, and 
never said please or thank you. Once, when we 
had not seen him for sixteen days, he knew there 
was something else he wanted but could not 
remember what. ^'Nosegays!" I could tell him, 



DETAILS 65 

and planked a packet on the counter. It was the 
one time I saw him smile. 

But it was not only business hours that brought 
forth these immortals; two of the best were al- 
ways with us in the superbly contrasted persons 
of our two orderlies. The slower and clumsier 
of the pair was by rights an Oxfordshire shepherd ; 
in the Army, even under necessity's sternest law, 
he was matter in the wrong place altogether. Ox- 
fordshire may not be actually a part of Wessex; 
but there is one part of Oxfordshire as remote as 
the scene of any of the Wessex novels, and that 
was our Strephon's native place. He might have 
been the real and original Gabriel Oak — as Mr. 
Hardy found him, not as we fortunately know the 
bucolic hero of Far from the Madding Crowd. 

Our Gabriel was the simplest bumpkin ever 
seen or heard off the London stage. He it was' 
who, in his early days in France, had heavily in- 
quired: "Who be this 'ere Fritz they be arl tark- 
in' about?" Thus did he habitually conjugate the 
verb to be; but all his locutions and most of his 
manners and customs, his puzzled head-scratch- 
ings, his audible self-communings, his crass sagac- 
ity and his simple cunning, were pastoral con- 
ventions of quite time-honoured theatricality. 
His very walk, for all his drills, was the ponder- 
ous waddle of the stage rustic. But on his own 
showing he had (like another Tommy) "proved 
one too many for his teachers" at an early stage 
of his military education. Not all their precept 
and profanity, not all his pristine ardour as a 



66 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

volunteer, had sufficed to put poor Gabriel on 
terms of adequate familiarity with his rifle. 

"I couldn' make nothin' of it, sir," he would say 
with rueful candour. "So they couldn' make noth- 
in' 0^ me." 

His simplicity was a joy, though he was some- 
times simple to a fault. One morning I caught 
him draining our tea-pot as a loving-cup : matted 
head thrown back, brawny elbows lifted, and the 
spout engulfed in his honest maw: a perfect sil- 
houette, not to be destroyed by a sound, much less 
a word of protest, even had we not been devoted 
to our gentle savage. But one of us did surrep- 
titiously attend to the spout before tea-time. And 
once before my eyes his ready lips sucked the con- 
densed milk ojBf our tin-opener before plunging it 
into a tin of potted meat. He had a moustache of 
obsolete luxuriance, I remember with a shudder 
in this connection ; but the last time I saw him the 
moustache was not. 

"You see, sir," explained Gabriel, regretfully, 
"I had a cold, an' it arl . . ." 

I hope my muscles were still under due control. 
To know our Gabriel was to perish rather than 
hurt his feelings; for he had the softest heart of 
his own, and in Oxfordshire a wife and children to 
share its affections with his ewes and lambs. "An' 
I think a lot on 'em, too, sir," said Gabriel, when 
he showed me the full family group (self in uni- 
form) done on his last "leaf." Really a sweet 
simpleton, even when (as I was nearly forgetting) 
he announced a brand-new Brigadier-General, who 



DETAILS 67 

had honoured me with a visit, as "A genleman to 
see you, sir!" 

The only man of us who had the heart to tell 
the angelic Gabriel off was his brother orderly, a 
respectable and patriotic Huish, if such a combi- 
nation can be conceived. Our Mr. Huish was 
the gentleman who always said it wanted five 
minutes to the 'alf-hour when it wanted at least 
ten, and too often sped the last of our lingering 
guests with insult into outer darkness. Like his 
prototype he was a fiery little Londoner, with a 
hacking cough and a husky voice ever rising to a 
shout in his dealings with bovine Gabriel. There 
was nothing of the beasts of the field about our 
Huish; he was the terrier type, and more than 
true to it in his fidelity to his temporary masters. 
At us he never snarled. His special province was 
the boiler stove ; he was generally blacked up to 
the red rims of his eyes, like a seaside minstrel, and 
might have been collecting money in his banjo 
as we saw him first of a dim morning. But the 
instrument was only our frying-pan carried at 
arm's length, and our approval of an unconscion- 
able lot of rashers all the recognition he required. 

'Wen I 'as plenty I likes to give plenty," was 
his disreputable watchword in these matters. I 
am afraid he was not supposed to cook for us at 
all. 

Huish was always bustling, or at least sham- 
bling with alacrity; whereas Gabriel went about 
his lightest business with ponderous deliberation 
and puzzled frown. 

Both were men of forty who had done the right 



68 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

thing early in the war; they had nothing else in 
common except the inglorious job which they owed 
to their respective infirmities. Huish, after many 
rejections on the score of his, had yet contrived 
to land in khaki at Lee Haver on the last day of 
the first battle of Ypres; and though he had never 
been nearer the fighting than he was with us, no 
one who knew his story or himself could have 
grudged him his 1914 ribbon. His canine delight, 
on learning that he was just entitled to it, was a 
thing to see and to enter into. 

Let us hope Gabriel did ; he was not very char- 
itable about Huish behind his back. It was Ga- 
briel's boast that he had ''never been in the 'ands 
of the police,'' and his shame to inform us that 
Huish had. But the sun has its spots, and the 
overwhelming superiority of Huish in munitions 
of altercation was perhaps some excuse. Daily we 
caught his rising voice and Gabriel's rumbling 
monotone; what it was about we never knew; 
but Huish had all the nerves in the kitchen, and 
the shepherd must have been a heavyweight on 
them at times. Their language, however, as we 
heard it under mutual provocation, was either a 
considerable compliment to the Y.M.C.A. or an 
exclusive credit to themselves. Gabriel was duly 
archangelic in this regard; the other's only free- 
dom a habit of calling a thing an 'ell of a thing, 
and on occasion an Elizabethan expressiveness, 
entirely inoffensive in his mouth. 

I wanted their photographs to take with me 
when I left, and had prevailed upon them to get 
taken together at my expense. The result lies 



DETAILS 69 

before me as I write. Both are washed, brushed 
up, shaven and uniformed out of daily knowledge. 
Huish stands keenly at attention, as smart as he 
could make himself; it is not his fault that the 
sleeves of his new tunic come down nearly to his 
finger-tips. On his right shoulder rests the for- 
giving paw of Gabriel; a perceptibly sardonic 
accentuation of the crow's-feet round his eyes may 
perhaps be attributed to this prompting of the 
shepherd's heart or the photographer's finesse. 
But the pose was a consummation; it was in the 
course of a preliminary transaction that their ex- 
cessive gratification obliged me to disclaim benev- 
olence. 

'1 shall want some of the copies for myself, you 
know," I had warned them both. 

"Quite right, sir!" cried Huish, heartily. "It's 
like a man with a dog an' a bitch — 'e must 'ave 'is 
pick o' the pups!" 

Huish could take the counter at a pinch, but it 
was neither his business nor his pleasure ; and our 
gentle shepherd found French coinage as dark a 
mystery as the British rifle. But we were very 
often assisted by an unpaid volunteer, another 
great character in his way. We never knew his 
name, and to me at least he was a new type. 
A Hull lad, eighteen years old, private in a La- 
bour Battalion employed near the town, he must 
have had work enough by day and night to satisfy 
even one of his strength and build, which were 
those of a little gorilla. And yet never a free 
evening had this boy but he must spend it behind 
our counter, slaving like the best of us for sheer 



70 NOTES OF A CAIVIP-FOLLOWER 

love. But it was the work he loved; he was a 
little shop-keeper born and bred; his heart was 
in the till at home; that was what brought him 
hot-foot to ours, and his passionate delight in the 
mere routine of retail trade was the new thing to 
me in human boyhood. 

At first I had wondered, the hobby seemed so 
unnatural : at first I even kept an eye on him and 
on the till. Our leader had gone on leave before 
the New Year; nobody seemed to know how far 
he had encouraged the boy, or the origin of his 
anomalous footing in the hut; and we were tak- 
ing a cool thousand francs a day. But our young 
volunteer bore microscopic scrutiny, but repaid it 
all. His was not only a labour of love unashamed 
but the joyous exercise of a gift, and the trium- 
phant display of an inherent power. He beat 
the best of us behind a counter. It was his ele- 
ment, not ours, for all the will and skill in the 
world; he was a fish among swimmers, a profes- 
sional among amateurs, and the greatest disci- 
plinarian of us all. The home till may have been 
behind a bar in the worst part of Hull, long prac- 
tice in prompt refusal have given him his short 
way with old soldiers opening negotiations out of 
their turn. It was a good way, however, as cheery 
as it was firm. I can hear it now: 

"Naw, yer dawn't, Jock! Get away back an^ 
coom oop in't queue like oother people!" 

It was never resented. Though not even one of 
us, but the youngest and lowliest of themselves, 
that urchin by his own virtue exercised the author- 
ity of a truculent N.C.O. with the whole military 



DETAILS 71 

machine behind him. I never heard a murmur 
against him, or witnessed the least reluctance to 
obey his ruling. And with equal impunity he ad- 
dressed all alike as "Jock." 

But that, though one of his many and quaint 
idiosyncrasies, was perhaps the covert compliment 
that took the edge off all the rest. 

And it brings me to the Jocks themselves, who 
deserve a place apart from Y.M.C.A. orderlies and 
the best of boys in a Labour Battahon. 

The Jocks 

First a word about this generic term of "Jock." 
I use it advisedly, yet not without a qualm. It is 
not for a civilian to drop into military familiar- 
ities on the strength of a winter with the Expe- 
ditionary Force ; but this sobriquet has spread be- 
yond all Army areas; like "Tommy," but with a 
difference worth considering, it has passed into 
the language of the man still left in the street. 
If not, it will; for you have only to see him at his 
job in the war, doing it in a way and a spirit all 
his own, and a Jock is a Jock to you ever after. 
As the cricketer said about the yorker, what else 
can you call him? 

The first time the word slipped off my tongue, 
except behind their backs, and I found I had called 
a superb young Seaforth Highlander "Jock" to his 
noble face, I stood abashed before him. It sound- 
ed an unpardonable liberty; apologise I must, and 
did. 

"It's a. name I am proud to be called by," said he 



72 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

quite simply. I never committed the apology 
again. 

It was not as though one had called an English 
soldier ^Tommy" to his face; the Jock's answer 
brought that home to me, and with something like 
a shock — not because "Jock'' was evidently rather 
more than a term of endearment, but because 
"Tommy" suddenly seemed rather less. Each 
carried its own nuance, its quite separate impli- 
cation, and somehow the later term took higher 
ground. I wondered how much later it was. Did 
it begin in South Africa? There were no Jocks 
in Barrack-room Ballads; but there was "Tom- 
my," the poem; and between those immortal lines 
I read my explanation. It was from them I had 
learnt, long years before either war, that it was 
actually possible for purblind peace-lovers to look 
down upon the British soldier, under the name 
those lines dinned in. The Jocks had not been 
christened in those dead days; that was their luck; 
that was the difference. Their name belonged to 
the spacious times which have given the fighting- 
man the place of honour in all true hearts. 

Hard on Tommy ! As for the Jocks, they have 
earned their good name if men ever did ; but I am 
to speak of them only as I saw them across a 
Y.M.C.A. counter, demanding "twust" without 
waste of syllables, or "wrichting-pads," or "caun- 
'les" ; huge men with little voices, little men with 
enormous muscles; men of whalebone with the 
quaint, stiff gait engendered by the kilt, looking 
as though their upper halves were in strait- 
waistcoats, simply because the rest of them goes 



DETAILS 73 

so free; figures of droll imperturbability, of bold 
and handsome sang-jroid, hunting in couples 
among the ruins for any fun or trouble that might 
be going. "As if the town belonged to them !" said 
one who loved the sight of them; but I always 
thought the distinctive thing about the Jock was 
his air of belonging to the town, ruined or other- 
wise, or to the bleak stretch of war-eaten country- 
side where one had the good fortune to encounter 
him. His matter-of-fact stolidity, his dry scorn of 
discomfort, the soul above hardship looking out of 
his keen yet dreamy eyes, the tight smile on his 
proud, uncomplaining lips — to meet all these in a 
trench was to feel the trench transformed to some 
indestructible stone alley of the Old Town. These 
men might have been bom and bred in dug-outs, 
and played all their lives in No-Man's Land, as 
town children play about a street and revel in 
its dangers. 

I am proud to remember that they held the part 
of the line I was in at Christmas. I saw them do 
everything but fight, and that I had no wish to see 
as a spectator; but everybody knows how they set 
about it, the enemy best of all. I have seen them, 
however, pretty soon after a raid : it was like talk- 
ing to a man who had just made a hundred at 
Lord's: our hut was the Pavilion. I never saw 
them with their blood up, and to see them merely 
under fire is to see them just themselves — not even 
abnormally normal like less steady souls. 

Said a Black Watchman in the hearing of a 
friend of mine, as he mended a parapet under 
heavy fire, in the worst days of '15: "I wish 



74' NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

they'd stop their bloody sniping — and let me get 
on with my work!" 

The Jock all over! So a busy man swears at a 
wasp, the Jock at war is just a busy man until 
something happens to put a stop to his business. 
In the meantime he is not complaining; he is not 
asking you when this dreadful war will finish; 
he is not telling you it can never be finished by 
fighting. He went to the war as a bridegroom to 
his bride, and he has the sense and virtue to make 
the best of his bargain till death or peace doth 
them part. He may sigh for his release like other 
poor devils; his pride will not let him sigh audi- 
bly; and as for "getting out of it," Divorce itself is 
not more alien to his stern spirit. It is true that 
he has the business in his blood; not the Cove- 
nanters only but the followers of Montrose and 
Claverhouse were Jocks before him. It is also true 
that even he is not always at concert pitch ; but his 
nerves do not relax or snap in damp or cold, as 
may the nerves of a race less inured through the 
centuries to hardship and the incidence of war. In 
bitter fighting there is nothing to choose between 
the various branches of the parent oak. The same 
sound sap runs through them all. But in bitter 
weather on the Western Front give me a hutful of 
Jocks I If only Dr. Johnson could have been with 
us in the Y.M.C.A. from last December to the 
day of big things! It would have spoilt the 
standing joke of his life. 

In the jaunty bonnet that cast no shadow on 
the bronzed face underneath, with the warm tints 
of their tartans between neat tunic and weather- 



DETAILS 75 

beaten knees, their mere presence lit up the 
scene; and to scrape acquaintance with one at 
random was nearly always to tap a character 
worthy of the outer man. There are those who 
insist that the discipline of the Army destroys 
individuality; it may seem so in the transition 
stage of training, but the nearer the firing-line 
the less I found it to be the case. I knew a 
Canadian missioner, turned Coldstream Guards- 
man, who was very strong and picturesque upon 
the point. 

"Out here," said he, "a man goes naked; he 
can't hide what he really is; he can't camouflage 
himself." 

The Jock does not try. In the life school of 
the war he stands stripped, but never poses; 
sometimes rugged and unrefined; often massive 
and majestic in body and mind; always statu- 
esque in his simplicity, always the least self con- 
scious of Britons. Two of his strongest points 
are his education and his religion, but he makes no 
parade of either, because both are in his blood. 
His education is as old as the least humorous of 
the Johnsonian jibes, as old as the Dominie and 
the taws: a union that bred no "brittle intellec- 
tuals," but hard-headed men who have helped the 
war as much by their steadfast outlook as by 
their zest and prowess in the field. As for their 
religion, it is the still deeper strain, mingled as of 
old with the fighting spirit of this noble race. It 
is most obvious in the theological students, even 
the full-fledged ministers, to be found in the ranks 
of the Jocks to-day; but I have seen it in rougher 



76 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

types who know nothing of their own sleeping 
fires, who are puzzled themselves by the blaze of 
joy they feel in battle and will speak of it with 
characteristic frankness and simplicity. 

"The pleasure it gives ye ! The pleasure it gives 
ye!" said one who had been breathing wonders 
about their ding-dong, hand-to-hand bomb-and- 
bayonet work. "This warr," he went on to de- 
clare, "will do more for Christianity than ever 
was done in the wurruld before." 

This also he reiterated, and then added sur- 
prisingly : 

"Mine ye, I'm no' a Christian mysel'; but this 
warr will do more for Christianity than ever was 
done in the wurruld before." 

The personal disclaimer was repeated in its 
turn, in order to remove any possible impression 
that the speaker was any better than he ought to 
be. At least I thought that was the explanation ; 
none was offered or indeed invited, for there were 
other men waiting at the counter; and we never 
met again, though he promised to come back next 
night. That boy meant something, though he did 
not mean me to know how much. He came from' 
Glasgow, talked and laughed like Harry Lauder, 
and did both together all the time. His conver- 
sation made one think. It would be worth re- 
cording for its cheery, confidential plunge into 
deep waters; nobody but a Jock would have taken 
the first header. 

Yet, out of France the Scottish have a reputa- 
tion for reserve ! Is it that in their thorough-go- 
ing way they strip starker than any, where all 



DETAILS 77 

go as naked as my Canadian friend declared? 

They are said to be (God bless them!) our most 
ferocious fighters. I should be sorry to argue the 
point with a patriotic Australian ; but my money is 
on the Jock as the most affectionate comrade. It 
is a touching thing to hear any soldier on a friend 
who has fought and fallen at his side; but the 
poetry that is in him makes it wonderful to hear 
a Jock; you get the swirl of the pipes in his voice, 
the bubble of a highland burn in his brown eyes. 
So tender and yet so terrible! So human and so 
justly humorous in their grief! 

"He was the best wee sergeant ever a mon had," 
one of them said to me, the night after a costly 
raid. We have no English word to compare with 
that loving diminutive; "little" comes no nearer 
it than "Tommy" comes near "Jock." One even 
doubts whether there are any "wee" sergeants 
who do not themselves make use of the word. 

I could tell many a moving tale as it was told 
to me, in an accent that I never adored before. 
On second thought, it is the very thing I cannot 
do and will not attempt. But here is a letter that 
has long been in my possession; a part of it has 
been in print before, in a Harrow publication, for 
it is all about a Harrow boy of great distinction; 
but this is the whole letter. It makes without ef- 
fort a number of the points I have been labouring; 
it throws a golden light on the relations between 
officers and men in a famous Highland Regiment; 
but its unique merit lies in the fact that it was 
not written for the boy's people to read. It is ^ 
Jock's letter to a Jock about their officer; 



78 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

France, 

X. m 1-9.15. 

Dear Tommy. 

Just a note to let you know that I am still alive and 
kicking. Things are much the same as when you 
left here. We have had one good kick up since you 
were wounded, that was on the 9th of May. We lost 

little Lieut. • , the best man that ever toed 

the line. You know what like he was; the arguments 
you and him used to have about politics. He always 
said you should have been Prime Minister. None of 
the rest of them ever mixed themselves with us the 
same as he done ; he was a credit to the regiment and 
to the father and mother that reared him; and Tommy 
the boys that are left of the platoon hopes that you 
will write to his father and mother and let them know 
how his men loved him, you can do it better than any 
of us. I enclose you a cutting out of a paper about 
his death. He died at the head of his platoon like the 
toff he was, and, Tommy, I never was very religious 

but I think little is in Heaven. He knew 

that it was a forlorn hope before we were half way, 
but he never flinched. He was not got for a week or 
two after the battle. Well, dear chum, I got your 
parcel and am very thankful for it. I will be getting 
a furlough in a week or two and I will likely come 
and see you, not half. All the boys that you knew are 
asking kindly for you. We are getting thinned out by 
degrees. There are 11 of us left of the platoon that 
you know — some dead, some down the line. But 
Tommy we miss you for your arguments, and the old 
fiddle was left at Parides, nobody to play it; but still 
we are full of life. I expect you will read some of 
these days of something big. I may tell you the 
Boches will get hell for leather before they are many 
days older. We have the men now and the material 
and we won't forget to lay it on. Old Bendy is major 
now, he gave us a lecture a while ago and he had a 
word to say about you and wee Hughes and Martin, 
that was the night that you went to locate the mortar 



DETAILS 79 

and came ia with the machine gun. He says the three 
of you were a credit to the regiment. I just wish you 
were back to keep up the fun, but your wife and 
bairns will like to keep you now. Well, Tommy, see 

and write to 's father and let him know how 

his men liked him, it will perhaps soften the blow. 
No more now, but I remain your ever loving chum 
and well wisher, Sandy. 

Good night and God bless you. 

P. S. Lochie Rob, J. Small, Philip Clyne, Duncan 
Morris, Headly, wee Mac, Ginger Wilson, Macrae and 
Dean Swift are killed. There are just three of us 
left in the section now, that is, Gordon, Black, and 
Martin, the rest drafted. 

Write soon. 

Thomas himself is not quite so simple. He is 
not writing as man to man, but to an intermediary 
who will show every word to "little 's" fam- 
ily. He is not speaking just for himself, but 
for his old platoon, and added to this responsibil- 
ity is the manly duty of keeping up his own re- 
pute, both as one who "should have been Prime 
Minister" and as one who "can do it better than 
any of us.'^ Thomas is somewhere or other in 
hospital, but for all his hurts there are passages 
of his that come from squared elbows and a very 
sturdy pen: 

"He was young so far as years were concerned, but 
he was old in wisdom. He never asked one of us to 
do that which he would not do himself. He shared 
our hardships and our joys. He was in fact one of 
ourselves as far as comradeship and brotherly love 
was concerned. We never knew who he was till we 
saw his death in the Press, but this we did know, that 
he was Lieut. ,—?«-«-«»», a gentleman and a eoldier 



80 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

every inch, and mind you the average Tommy is not 
too long in getting the size of his officer, and it is not 

every day that one like joins the Army. 

. . . He was liked by his fellow-officers, but he was 
loved, honoured and respected by his men, and you 
know, Sir, that / am not guilty of paying tributes to 
any one where they are not deserved. . . ." 

I love Thomas for the two italicised asides. It 
was not he who underlined them; but they de- 
clare his politics as unmistakably as Sandy's 
bit about those arguments with their officer. For 
'^little '' was the son of one of Scotland's no- 
blest and most ancient houses; but Thomas is 
careful to explain that they never knew that un- 
til the papers told them, and we have internal 
evidence that Sandy never gave it a thought. He 
lays no stress on the fact that "none of the rest of 
them ever mixed themselves with us the same as 
he done": the gem of both tributes, when you 
come to think of it. 

I think of it the more because I knew this young 
Harrovian a little in his brilliant boyhood (Head 
of the School and Captain of the Football Eleven), 
but chiefly because I happen to have seen his 
grave. It is on the outskirts of a village that was 
still pretty and wooded in early '17, though the 
church was in a bad way even then. Now there 
can be little left; but I hope against hope that 
some of the wooden crosses which so impressed 
me are still intact. For there as ever among his 
men, I think even alongside "wee Mac" and the 
others named in that pathetic postscript, lies "lit- 



DETAILS 81 

tie ," truly "mixing himself with them" tq 

the last! 

In the same row, under mound and cross as neat 
as any, lay "an unknown German soldier"; and 
for his sake, perhaps, if all have not been blown 
to the four winds, the present occupiers* will do 
what can be done to protect and preserve the rest- 
ing place of "little " and his Jocks. 

Gunners 

Next to the Jocks, I used to find the Gunners the 
cheeriest souls about a hut. Nor do I believe that 
mine was a chance experience; for the constant 
privilege of inflicting damage on the Hun must 
be, despite a very full share of his counter-atten- 
tions, a perpetual source of satisfaction. A Gunner 
is oftener up and doing, far seldomer merely suf- 
fering, than any other being under arms. The 
infantry have so much to grin and bear, so very 
much that would be unbearable without a grin, 
that it is no wonder if the heroic symbol of their 
agony be less in evidence upon ordinary occasions. 
Cheeriness with them has its own awful connota- 
tion: they are almost automatically at their best 
when things are at their worst; but the gunner 
is always enjoying the joke of making things un- 
pleasant for the other side. He is the bowler who 
is nearly certain of a good match. 

He used to turn up at our hut at all hours, 
sometimes in a Balaclava helmet that reminded 
one of other winter sports, often with his extremi- 

♦ July, 1918. 



82 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

ties frozen by long hours in the saddle or on his 
limber, but never wearied by much marching, and 
never in any but the best of spirits. He was al- 
ways an interesting man, who knew the Line as a 
strolling player knows the Road, but neither knew 
nor cared where he was to give the next perform- 
ance. I associate him with a ruddy visage and 
a hearty manner that brought a breeze in from 
the outer world, as a good stage sailor brings one 
from the wings. 

One great point about the Gunners is that you 
can see them at their job. I had seen them at it 
on a former brief visit to the Front, and even had 
a foretaste of their quality of humour, which is 
by no means so heavy as a civilian wag might ap- 
prehend. The scene was the tight-rope road be- 
tween Albert and Bapaume, then stretched across 
a chasm of inconceivable devastation, and only 
three-parts in our hands; in fact we were indus- 
triously shelling Bapaume and its environs when a 
car from the Visitors' Chateau dumped two of us, 
attended by a red-tabbed chaperon, in the very 
middle of our guns. 

Not even in later days do I remember such a 
row as they were making. Shells are as bad, but 
I imagine one does not hear a great many quite 
so loud and live to write about it. Drum-fire must 
be worse at both ends; but I have heard only dis- 
tant drum-fire, and on the spot it must have this 
advantage, that its continuity precludes surprise. 
But a series of shattering surprises was the es- 
sence of our experience before Bapaume. The 
guns were all over the place, and fiendishly cam- 



DETAILS 83 

ouflaged. I was prepared for all sorts of cunning 
and picturesque screens and emplacements, and 
indeed had looked for them. I was not prepared 
for absolutely invisible cannon of enormous cal- 
ibre that seemed to loose off over our shoulders 
or through our legs the moment our backs were 
turned. 

If you happened to be looking round you were 
all right. You saw the flash, and your eye fore- 
warned your ear in the fraction of a second before 
the bang, besides reassuring you as to the actual 
distance between you and the blazing gun; but 
whenever possible it took a mean advantage, and 
had me ducking as though somebody had shouted 
"Heads!" I say ''me," not before it was time; 
for I can only speak with honesty for myself. By 
flattering chance I was pretending to enjoy this 
experience in good company indeed ; but the great 
man might have been tramping his own moor, and 
doing the shooting himself, for all the times I saw 
his eyelids flicker or his massive shoulders wince. 
He made no more of a howitzer that jovially 
thundered and lightened in our path, over our 
very heads, than of the brace of sixty-pounders 
whose peculiarly ear-destroying duet "scratched 
the brain's coat of curd" as we stood only too close 
behind them. They might have been a brace of 
Irish Members for all their intimidatory effect on 
my illustrious companion. 

But the fun came when we adjourned to the 
Battery Commander's dug-out, and somebody sug- 
gested that the Forward Observing Officer would 
feel deeply honoured by a word on the telephone 



84 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

from so high an Ofl&cer of State. All urbanity, 
the O.S. took down the receiver, and was heard 
introducing himself to the F.0.0. by his official 
designations, as though high office alone could 
excuse such a liberty. The receiver cackled like 
a young machine-gun, and the O.S. beamed dryly 
on the O.C. 

"He wants to know who the devil I really am!" 
he reported with due zest. 

Hastily the spectacled young Major vouched 
for the other speaker. The receiver changed hands 
once more. The Forward Observing Officer was 
evidently as good as his style and title. 

"He says — 'in that case' — I'd better look him 
up!" twinkled the O.S. "Is there time? He says 
he's quite close to the sugar factory." 

The sugar factory was unmistakable, not as a 
flagrant sugar factory but as the only fragment of 
a building left standing within the sky-line. It 
proved a snare. Our F.0.0. was unknown there; 
if he had ever been at the ex-factory, he had kept 
himself to himself and gone without leaving an 
address; and though we sought him high and low 
among the shell-holes, under the belching muz- 
zles of our guns, it was not intended by Provi- 
dence (nor yet peradventure by himself) that we 
should track that light artillery comedian to his 
place of concealment. 

Still, one can get at a gunner (in the above sense 
only) quicker than at any other class of acquain- 
tance in the Line. 

It is, after all, a very small war in the same 
sense as it is said to be a small world ; and in our 



DETAILS 85 

ruined town I was always running into some sol- 
dier whom I had known of old in leather or pru- 
nella. I have had the pleasure of serving an old 
servant as an impressive N.C.O., of welcoming 
others of all ranks on both sides of the counter. 
Thus it was that one day I had a car lent me to 
go pretty well where I liked, subject to the 
approval of a young Staff Officer, my escort. I 
thought of a Gunner friend hidden away some- 
where in those parts. He was an Old Boy of my 
old school. So, as it happened, was the High 
Commander to whom the car belonged ; so, by an 
extraordinary chance, was the young Staff Offi- 
cer. The oldest of them, of course, long years 
after my time; but an All Uppingham Day for 
me, if ever I had one! I only wish we could have 
claimed the hero of the day as well. 

The car took us to within a couple of miles of 
my friend, who was not above another mile from 
No-Man's Land. It was a fairly lively sector at 
the best of times, which was about the time I was 
there. The enemy had shown unseasonable activ- 
ity only the night before, and we met some of the 
casualties coming down a light railway, up which 
we walked the last part of the way. Two or three 
khaki figures pushing a truck laden with a third 
figure — supine, blanketed, and very still: that was 
the picture we passed several times in the thin 
February sunlight. One man looked as dead as 
the livid landscape ; one had a bloody head and a 
smile that stuck; one was walking, supported by a 
Red Cross man, coughing weakly as he went. 
Round about our destination were a number of 



86 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

shell-sockets, very sharp and clean, all made in 
the night. 

It was quite the deepest dug-out I was ever in, 
but I was not sorry when I had found my eyes in 
the twilight of its single candle. Warm, down 
there; a petrol engine throbbing incomprehen- 
sibly behind a curtain at the foot of the flight; a 
ventilating shaft at the inner end; hardly any 
more room than in an Uppingham study. How 
we talked about the old place, three school gen- 
erations of us, sitting two on a bed until I broke 
down the Major's! The Major might have been 
bored before that — ^he who alone had not been 
there. But even my ponderous performance did 
not disturb a serene forbearance, a show of more 
than courteous interest, which encouraged us to 
persist in that interminable gossip about ma-sters 
(with imitations!) so maddening to the uniniti- 
ated. At length the petrol engine stopped; I 
doubt if we did, though steak and onions now 
arrived. May I never savour their crude smell 
again without remembering that time and place: 
the oftener the better, if there be those present 
who do not know about the Major. 

His second-in-command, my Uppingham friend, 
told me as he saw us along the light railway on 
our way back. In 1914 the Major had been 
a Nonconformist Minister. Never mind the De- 
nomination, or the part of Great Britain: be- 
cause the Call sounded faint there, and his flock 
were slow to answer, the shepherd showed the 
way, himself enlisting in the ranks: because he 
was what he was, and came whence he came, here 



DETAILS 87 

and thus had I found him in 1918, commanding a 
battery on the Somme, at the age — but that would 
be a tale out of school. A legion might be made 
up of the men whose real ages are nobody's busi- 
ness till the war is over; then they might be 
formed into a real old Guard of Honour, and splen- 
didissime mendax might be their motto. 

I do not say the Major would qualify. I have 
forgotten exactly what it was I heard upon the 
point. But I am not going to forget something 
that reached me later from another source alto- 
gether, namely, the lips of a sometime N.C.O. of 
the Battery. 

'There was not," he asserted, "better disci- 
pline in any battery in France. But not a man of 
us ever heard the Major swear." 

It was a great friend of mine that I had gone 
forth to see: a cricketer whose only sin was the 
century that kept him out of the pavilion : a man 
without an enemy but the one he turned out to 
fight at forty. Yet the man I am gladdest to have 
seen that day on the Somme is not my friend, but 
my friend's friend and Major. . . . And to think 
that he opened his kindly fire upon me by saying 
absurd things about the only book of mine which 
has very many friends; and that I let him, God 
forgive me, instead of bowing down before the 
gorgeous man ! 

The Guards 

The Jocks started me thinking in units, the 
Gunners set me off on the chance meetings of 
this little war, and between them they have taken 



88 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

me rather far afield from my Noah's ark in the 
mud. But I am not going back just yet, though 
the ground is getting dangerous. I am only too 
well aware of that. It is presumptuous to praise 
the living; and I for one would rather stab a man 
in the back than pat him on it; but may I humbly 
hope that I do neither in these notes? The bris- 
thng risks shall not deter me from speaking of 
marvellous men as I found them, nor yet from ex- 
pressing as best I may the homage they inspired. 
I can only leave out their names, and the names of 
the places where we met, and trust that my pre- 
cautions are not themselves taken in vain. But 
there is no veiling whole units, or at least no 
avoiding some little rift within the veil. And 
when the unit is the Guards — but even the 
Guards were not all in one place last winter. 

Enough that at one time there were Guards- 
men to be seen about the purlieus of that "bat- 
tered caravanserai'' which the war found an 
antique city of sedate distinction, and is like to 
leave yet another scrap-heap. The Guards were 
in the picture there, if not so much so as the 
Jocks; for in kilt and bonnet the Jocks on active 
service are more like Jocks than the Guards are 
like Guardsmen; nevertheless, and wherever they 
wander, the Guards are quite platitudinously un- 
like any other troops on earth. 

Memorable was the night they first swarmed 
into my first hut. "Debouched," I dare say, 
would be the more becoming word; but at any 
rate they duly marched upon the counter, in close 
order at that, and (as the correspondents have it) 



DETAILS 89 

"as though they had been on parade." Few of 
them had anything less than a five-franc note; all 
required change ; soon there was not a coin in the 
till. I wish the patronesses of Grand Clearance 
Sales could have seen how the Guards behaved 
that night. Not one of them showed impatience; 
not one of them was inconsiderate, much less 
impolite; the sanctity of the queue could not 
have been more scrupulously observed had our 
Labour boy been there to see to nothing else. He 
was not there, and I sighed for him when there 
was time to sigh; for it was easily the hardest 
night's work I had in France. But the Guards 
did their best to help us ; they were always buying 
more than they wanted "to make it even money'^ ; 
continually prepared to present the Y.M.C.A. 
with the change we could not give them. Never 
was a body of men in better case — calmer, more 
immaculate, better-set-up, more dignified and 
splendid to behold. They might have walked 
across from Wellington Barracks; they were 
actually fresh from what I have heard them call 
"the Cambrai do." 

There was a bitterly cold night a little later on ; 
it was also later in the night. My young chief 
was already a breathing pillar of blankets. I was 
still cowering over a reddish stove, thinking of the 
old hot-water bottle which was even then prepar- 
ing a place for my swaddled feet: from outer 
darkness came the peculiar crunch of heavy boots 
— many pairs of them — rhythmically planting 
themselves in many inches of frozen snow. I 
went out and interviewed a Guards' Corporal with 



90 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

eighteen eager, silent file behind him, all off a 
leave train and shelterless for the night, unless 
we took them in. I pointed out that we had no 
accommodation except benches and trestle-tables, 
and the bare boards of the hut, where the stove 
had long been black and the clean mugs were 
freezing to their shelf. 

"We shall be very satisfied," replied the corpo- 
fal, "to have a roof over us." 

I can hear him now: the precise note of his 
appreciation, candid yet not oppressive : the dig- 
nified, unembittered tone of a man too proud to 
make much of a minor misfortune of war. Yet 
for fighting-men just back from Christmas leave, 
howsoever it may have come about, what a wel- 
come! I never felt a greater brute than lying 
warm in my bed, within a yard of the stove that 
still blushed for me, and listening to those silent 
men taking off their accoutrements with as little 
noise as possible, preparing for a miserable night 
without a murmur. Later in the winter, it was 
said that men were coming back from leave dis- 
gruntled and depressed. My answer was this 
story of the corporal and the eighteen freezing file. 
But they were Guardsmen nearly all. 

Not the least interesting of individual Guards- 
men was one who across our counter nicely and 
politely declared himself an anarchist. It was the 
slack hour towards closing-time, before the Na- 
tional Anthem at the cinema prepared us for the 
final influx, and I am glad I happened to be free 
to have that chat. It was most instructive. My 
Guardsman, who was accompanied by the inev- 



DETAILS 91 

itable Achates, was not a temporary soldier; both 
were fine, seasoned men of twelve or thirteen 
years* service, who had been through all the war, 
with such breaks as their tale of wounds had neces- 
sitated. The anarchist did all the talking, begin- 
ning (most attractively to me) about cricket. He 
was a keen watcher of the game, an old habitue 
of Burton Court and intense admirer of certain 
distinguished performers for the Household Bri- 
gade. "A great man!" was his concise encomium 
for more than one. How the anarchy came in I 
have forgotten. It was decked in dark sayings of 
a rather homely cut, concerning the real war to 
follow present preliminaries; but I thought the 
real warrior was himself rather in the dark as to 
what it was all to be about. At any rate he failed 
to enlighten me, as perhaps I failed to enlighten 
him on the common acceptation of the term "an- 
archy." Reassure me he did, however, by several 
parenthetical observations, which seemed to fall 
from the inveterate soldier rather than the soi- 
disant revolutionary. 

"But of course we shall see this war through 
first," he kept interrupting himself to impress on 
me. "Nothing will be done till we have beaten 
Germany." 

On balance I was no wiser about the anarchist 
point of view, but all the richer for this peep 
into a Guardsman's mind. It was like a good sani- 
tary cubicle filled with second-hand gimcrackery, 
but still the same good cubicle, still in essentials 
exactly like a few thousand more. The meretri- 
cious jumble was kept within rigid bounds of dis- 



92 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

cipline and good manners, and not as a tempo- 
rary measure either; for I was solemnly assured 
that the "real war/' when it came, would be a 
bloodless one. Let us hope other incendiaries 
will adopt my friend's somewhat difficult ideal 
of an ordered anarchy! As for his manners, I 
can only say I have heard views with which I 
was in full personal agreement made more offen- 
sive by a dogmatic advocate than were these mon- 
strous but quite amiable nebulosities. If an- 
archy is to come, I know which anarchist I want 
to "ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm''; 
he will spare Burton Court, I do believe; and 
even catch himself saluting, with true Guards' 
elan, the "great men" who are still permitted to 
hit out of it. 

Tradition in the Guards, you conjecture, means 
more than machine-guns, more than artillery sup- 
port; it is half the battle they are always pull- 
ing out of the fire. It may be other things as 
well. I heard a delightful story about one Bat- 
talion — but I heard it from a fellow-tradesman 
whose business it is (or was, before the war) 
to say more than his prayers. The libel, for it is 
too good to be true, was that one of these 
Senior Battalions, having given a dinner in some 
Flemish town early in the war, did a certain 
amount of inadvertent damage to municipal prop- 
erty during the subsequent proceedings. One in 
authority wrote to apologise to the maire, enclos- 
ing the wherewithal for reparation: whereupon 
the maire presented himself in high glee, brandish- 
ing an equally handsome apology for the same 



DETAILS 93 

thing done in the same place by the same Regi- 
ment in— 1711! 

One royal night I had myself as the guest of 
a Company in another of their Battalions. The 
camp was about half-way between our hut 
and the front line, near the road and in mud 
enough to make me feel at home. But whereas 
we weltered in a town-locked pool, this was in the 
open sea; not a tree or a chink of masonry in 
sight; just a herd of "elephants" or Nissen huts, 
linked up by a network of duck-boards like ladders 
floating in the mud. Mud! It was more like 
clotted cocoa to a mind debauched by such tipple, 
and the great split tubes of huts like a small 
armada turned turtle in the filth. 

The outer tube, I think, was steel — duly corru- 
gated — but wooden inner tubes made the mess- 
hut and the one I shared with my host voluptu- 
ously snug and weather-proof. It was the wild- 
est and wettest night of all the winter, but not 
a drop or a draught came in anywhere, and I am 
afraid I thought with selfish satisfaction of the 
many perforations in our own thin-skinned hut. 
An open fire was another treat to me; and I re- 
member being much intrigued by a buttery-hatch 
in the background. It reminded me of the third 
act of The Admirable Crichton. 

There were only four of us at dinner, or five 
including a parrot who hopped about saying 
things I have forgotten. All the other three were 
temporary Guardsmen; that I knew; but to me 
they seemed the lineal descendants of the bear- 
skinned and whiskered heroes in old volumes of 



94 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWEB 

Punch. I suppose they were colder in their Bala- 
clava huts, but I warrant the other atmosphere 
was much the same. We should not have had 
Wagner on a gramophone before Sebastopol; but 
they would have given me Veuve Cliquot, or 
whatever the very best may have been in those 
days; and if I had committed the solecism of 
asking for more bread, having consumed my stat- 
utory ration, the mess-waiter of 1855 would have 
put me right in the same solicitous undertone 
that spared my blushes in 1918. The perfect 
blend of luxury and discipline would have been 
as captivating then as now and ever, and the kind- 
ness of my hosts a thing to write about in fear 
and trembling, no matter how gratefully. 

But there would have been no duck-boards to 
follow through wind and rain to my host's warm 
hut, and I should not be looking back upon as 
snug a winter's night as one could wish to spend. 
How we lay talking while the storm frittered its 
fury upon the elephant's tough hide ! Once more 
it was talk of schooldays, but not of mine; it was 
all about Eton this time, and nearly all about a 
boy there who had been most dear to us both. He 
was now out here in his grave; but which of them 
was not? Of the group that I knew best before 
the war, only he whom I was with to-night! I lay 
awake listening to his even breathing, and prayed 
that he at least might survive the holocaust yet to 
come. 



LORD'S LEAVE 
(1915) 

No Lord's this year: no silken lawn on which 
A dignified and dainty throng meanders. 

The Schools take guard upon a fierier pitch 
Somewhere in Flanders. 

Bigger the cricket here; yet some who tried 
In vain to earn a Colour while at Eton, 

Have found a place upon an England side 
That can't be beaten! 

A demon bowler's bowling with his head — 
His heart's as black as skins in Carolina! 

Either he breaks, or shoots almost as dead 
As Anne Eegina; 

While the deep-field-gun, trained upon your stumps, 
From concrete grand-stand far beyond the bound'ry, 

Lifts up his ugly mouth and fairly pumps 
Shells from Krupp's Foundry. 

But like the time the game is out of joint — 
No screen, and too much mud for cricket lover; 

Both legs go slip, and there's sufficient point 
In extra cover! 

Cricket? 'Tis Sanscrit to the Super-Hun — 
Cheap cross between Caligula and Cassius 

To whom speech, prayer, and warfare are all one-^ 
Equally gaseous! 

95 



96 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

Playing a game's beyond him and his hordes; 

Theirs but to play the snake or wolf or vulture! 
Better one sporting lesson learnt at Lord's 

Than all their Kultur. . . . 

Sinks a torpedoed Phcebus from our sight; 

Over the field of play see darkness stealing; 
Only in this one game, against the light 
There's no appealing. 

Now for their flares . . . and now at last the stars . 

Only the stars now, in their heavenly million, 
Glisten and blink for pity on our scars 

From the Pavilion. 



IV 

A BOY'S GRAVE 

Somewhere in Flanders there was a ruined es- 
taminet, with an early trench running round it, 
that I longed to see for the sake of a grave in a 
farm-yard not far behind. The grave itself was 
known to be obliterated. Though dug very deep 
by men who loved the boy they laid there at dead 
of night, and though the Sergeant (who loved 
him most) could say what a strong cross they had 
placed over it, the grave was so situated, and the 
whole position so continuously under fire, that 
official registration was never possible, nor any 
further reassurance to be had. The boy's Di- 
vision went out of the Line, and at length went 
back into another sector; but more than one of- 
ficer who knew his people, and one brave friend 
who had only heard of them, searched the spot 
without avail. For two years it was so near the 
enemy and so heavily shelled that the fear be- 
came a moral certainty that everything had been 
swept away; then the boy's father chanced to 
meet his Army Commander; and that great hu- 
man soldier ordered the investigation that bore 
out every dread. Nothing remained to mark the 
grave. And yet I longed to see the place; the 
tide of battle had at last receded ; at least I might 

97 



98 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

see what was left of the trench where the boy had 
fallen, and have something to tell his mother on 
my return. So I had set my heart, originally, 
on working for the Y.M.C.A. in Flanders. Had 
I been given my way about that, very little that 
I have now to tell could possibly have happened. 

It was ordained, however, that I should go to 
France, and a long way down the Line, an im- 
possible journey from my secret goal. To be 
honest, I had a voice in this myself, and even 
readily acquiesced in the arrangement; for there 
were sound reasons for taking the first opening 
that offered; and on reflection I saw myself the 
unsoundness of my first position. After all, I was 
not going out for secret or for private ends; and 
even in Flanders, what means or what authority 
should I have had for hunting among graves, 
marked or unmarked? What guide could I have 
hoped to get to show me all I wished to see, and 
what could I have seen or done without a guide? 
Already the new plan spelt a providential exclu- 
sion from a sphere of futile mortification and di- 
vided desires: to France I went, and with an easy 
mind. And in France the first people I saw, in 
my first hut, as customers across the counter, 
were the boy's old Division! 

I suppose the odds against that must have 
been fairly long. Of all the Divisions in the B. 
E. F. only three were plying between our town 
and the Line; and of those three that Division 
was one. It was, moreover, the one that we saw 
most of in the Ark. Theirs were the pink bar- 
racks just outside our gates; it was their cinema 



A BOY'S GRAVE 99 

that lay across our bows in the mud ; their mot- 
ley Battalions that could make the hut a Babel 
of all the dialects in Great Britain. The boy's 
Brigade was up the Line when I arrived ; in a few 
days it came down, and under the familiar regi- 
mental cap-badge how eagerly I sought the faces 
that looked old enough to have three years* serv- 
ice! They are the veterans of this war; but few, 
it seemed, were left. Did I discover one, he had 
not been in B Company. I grew ashamed of 
questioning. It was not before the Brigade had 
been up the Line for another sixteen days, and 
come back again, that a little hard-bitten man 
aroused fresh hopes and passed all tests. He had 
not only been in the Regiment at the time, but 
in B Company; not only in B Company, but in 
the boy's platoon; there when he fell; one of the 
burial party! 

We had a long talk in the inner room. It ap- 
peared there were two other survivors of the 
old Platoon; the Sergeant, as I knew to my sor- 
row, had died Company Sergeant-Major at Pas- 
schendaele. Of the other two, one in particular, 
now a bandsman but in 1915 a stretcher-bearer, 
could tell me everything: he should come and see 
me himself. He never did come, and I saw no 
more of the little man who promised to send him. 
Once again they all went up the Line, and by the 
time that tour was over I had deserted the hut 
near their barracks. The little man called there 
and left a message ; it was to say he was going on 
leave for three weeks, and the Battalion were 
going away to rest. When they all got back, he 



100 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

would bring the bandsman to see me without faiL 
It is a long story; but then Coincidence (or 
what we will) was stretching a very long arm. 
Coincidence (at least in the literal sense) was 
indeed stretching out both arms: one of them was 
busy all this time at distant Ypres. An unknown 
friend there, remotely connected with the boy's 
people, thought he had discovered the boy's grave. 
He had written home to say so; the news was 
sent out to me, and we got into correspondence. 
He had searched the shell-blasted farm-yard 
where the burial was known to have taken place, 
and he had discovered — evidence. Some of this 
evidence he eventually sent me: a cheap French 
or Flemish watch, red with the rust and mould 
of a soldier's grave: just the watch that a boy 
would buy at the nearest town for his imme- 
diate needs. Now, at the time of his death, this 
boy's watch was being mended in London ; there- 
fore, the lone now in my hands was good evi- 
dence as far as it went. A boot-strap had been 
found as well, and something else that tallied ter- 
ribly; on the strength of all this testimony, and 
of an instinctive certainty in the mind of our un- 
known friend, a new cross already marked the site 
of these discoveries. He wanted me to see the 
place for myself, and as soon as possible, in case 
the enemy should make his expected thrust in 
that quarter. Nor could I have gone too soon 
for my own satisfaction. Grave or no grave (for 
I could not quite share his sanguine conviction), 
I longed to grasp the hand of a man who had done 



A BOY^S GRAVE 101 

so much for people he had never met: and to see 
all there was to see with my own eyes. 

But it is not so easy to travel sixty miles up 
or down the Line. It is a question of permits, 
which take some getting, and of facilities which 
very properly do not exist. Military railways 
are not for the transport of civilian camp-follow- 
ers on private business; moreover, they do go 
slow when there is no military occasion for much 
speed; and I had my work, when all was said. 
But my luck (if you like) was in again. The first 
old friend that I had met in France was a friend 
in a higher place than I may say. Already he 
had shown himself my friend indeed ; now, in my 

need But here the coincidences multiply and 

must be kept distinct. 

On the very morning I heard from Ypres — ^with 
the watch and the invitation — I was due to visit 
this old friend in another part altogether. He sent 
his car for me, the splendid man. I showed him 
my letter from Ypres. 

"You will have to go," he said. 

"Buthowr 

"In my car." 

"Sixty miles!" 

(It was much more from where he was.) 

"You can have it for two days." 

I could not thank him; nor can I here. How 
can a man speak for the mother of an only child, 
whose grave he was to see with her eyes as well 
as with his own, so that one day he might tell 
her all? Without a car, in fine, the thing was im- 
possible, There are no thanks for actions such 



102 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

as this: none that words do not belittle. A day 
was fixed, ten days ahead; this gave me time to 
write to the boy's mother, and gave her time to 
send direct to Ypres all the bulbs and plants that 
she could get, to make her child's bed as gay that 
spring as he himself had been all the days they 
were together. 

And yet — and yet — was it his grave that had 
been found? Was the evidence as good as it 
seemed? I was going all the way to Ypres on the 
strength of that local evidence only. If I could 
but have taken one or other of those two men 
who were there when it happened in 1915! But 
one of them was away on leave, his three weeks 
not nearly up ; the other, the bandsman who knew 
most of all, might or might not be with the Bat- 
talion; but the Battalion itself was still away. 
I found that out for certain on the morning of 
the day before I was to start. They were still 
resting many kilometres back. I had no means 
of getting to them, even if I had had the right 
sort of desire; but the fact was that everything 
had come about so beautifully without one move 
of mine, that I was quite consciously content to 
drift in the current of an unfathomable influence. 

That afternoon there came to my hut, for no 
particular reason that he ever told me, a man 
I had not met before. He was the Senior Chap- 
lain of the boy's Division. We made friends, 
by what steps I cannot remember, but I must 
have told him where I was going next day. He 
was interested. I told him the whole thing. He 
said: *'But surely there must be somebody in 



A BOY'S GRAVE 103 

the Battalion that you could take with you, to 
identify the place?" I told him there was such 
a man, a bandsman, but the Battalion was away 
resting and I was not sure but that the man 
himself was on leave. Said the Chaplain: "I 
can find out. I know where they are. I can get 
them on the telephone. If you don't hear from 
me again, go round their way in the morning 
when you get the car. It's ten kilometres in the 
wrong direction, but it may be worth your while." 

Worth my while! I did not hear from him 
again; not a word all that anxious evening to 
spoil the prospect he had opened up ; and in the 
morning came the car, a powerful limousine, 
mine for the next two days! My pass from the 
A. P. M. was for Ypres only, but I did not think 
of that. In less than an hour we had found 
those rest-billets among ploughed fields at peace 
in the spring sunshine; and at the right regimen- 
tal headquarters, a young Corporal ready waiting 
in his field overcoat. It was the bandsman: he 
who had been nearest to the boy at the very 
last, to whose special care his dear body had 
been committed. The living man who had most 
to tell me! 

And the first thing he told me showed what a 
mercy it was to have him with me; but at the 
moment it came as a shock. I had shown him 
the watch; he had shaken his head. No watch 
had been buried with the boy; of that the Cor- 
poral was unshakably certain; and he was the 
man to know, the man whose duty it had been 
to make sure at the time. Away went our strong- 



104 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWEH 

est piece of evidence! Then I told him about 
the boot-strap, always a doubtful item in my 
own mind; and the Corporal swept it aside at 
once. The boy had not worn boots with straps; 
he had worn ordinary laced boots and puttees; 
exactly as I had been thinking at the back of 
my mind. He had not been out many weeks, and 
I knew every noble inch of him that went away. 
So, after all, it was not his grave that had been 
found! That would have been a grievous blow 
but for the transcending thought — it was not his 
grave that had been disturbed! And we might 
never have known but for this young soldier at 
my side, who was saying quite confidently that he 
could show me where the grave really was! One 
of — at most — three living men who could! 

Who had brought him to my side — at the last 
moment — the very man I wanted — the one man 
needful? 

To be sure, the Senior Chaplain of their Divi- 
sion ; but why should the Senior Chaplain, a man 
I never saw before, have come to my hut in the 
nick of time to do me this service, so definitely 
desired? Why should I myself have come to the 
very place in France where the Division was 
waiting for me — the one place where I had also 
an old friend with a car to lend me when the 
time came? Why had I not gone to Belgium 
(to be near the boy) as I at first intended? And 
why, at that very time, should a complete stranger 
have been making entirely independent efforts 
to find the grave in Belgium that I yearned to 
see? 



A BOY'S GRAVE 105 

"Chance" is no answer, unless the word be held 
to cover an organic tissue of chances, each in turn 
closely related to some other chance, all com- 
ponent parts of a chance whole! And what sen- 
sation novelist would build a plot on such foun- 
dations and hope to make his tale convincing? 
Not I, at my worst; and there were more of these 
chances still to come, albeit none that mattered 
as did those already recounted. 

Nor is there very much left to tell that bears 
telling here. In Ypres I did not find my great 
unknown friend; he had warned me, when it was 
,too late to alter plans, that he might be called 
home on a private matter; and this had hap- 
pened. But he had told mfe I should find his 
"trusty Sergeant," who had taken part in the in- 
vestigations, ready to help me in every way; and 
so, indeed, I did. The man was, among other 
things, an enthusiastic amateur gardener; he had 
known exactly what to do with the bulbs and 
plants, which he had unpacked on their arrival 
and was keeping nice and moist for next morn- 
ing. But this was not the first thing we had to 
talk about. The first thing was to impress upon 
the Sergeant the importance of not letting my 
witness know that a new cross had been put up, 
and so to insure absolutely independent identi- 
fication of the spot. He gave me his promise, 
and I know he kept it. 

Next morning, under a leaden February sky, 
the three of us drove north in the car, accom- 
panied by a second Sergeant with digging tools, 
in case the bandsman located the grave elsewhere 



lOG NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

and I was bent upon some proof. At the time 
I did not know why he was with us; later, the 
quiet little fact above spoke volumes for the 
good faith of the party. It was completed by a 
young Catholic Padre from Ypres, so that the 
only office which the boy had lacked at the hands 
of his dear men might now be fulfilled. 

I am following the course we took upon a mili- 
tary map given to the boy's father by one of the 
many officers who had befriended him in his 
trouble; and I had been prepared for the thick- 
ening cluster of shell-holes further on by more 
than one aeroplane photograph sent from Army 
Headquarters. Oh, that all whom this war has 
robbed of their hearts' delight could know, as this 
father knows, how the huge heart of the Army 
is with them in their sorrow! There was the 
Army Commander, who had done what he could 
for a man he met but once by chance ; it was not 
much that even he could do, but how more than 
readily it had been done! And now here in the 
car, itself a tangible sign of infinite compassion, 
were these N.C.O.'s and this young priest, with 
their grave faces and their kind eyes! One's 
heart went out to them. It seemed all wrong to 
be taking men, who any day might be in theirs, 
to see a soldier's grave in cold blood. So we fell 
to discussing the sky, the mud, and such land- 
marks as remained, quite simply and naturally, as 
the boy himself would have wished. 

^Tlains that the moonlight turns to sea," the 
boy had quoted in describing the plain we were 
crofifiing now; but it had become a broken plain 



A BOY'S GRAVE 107 

since his time; covered with elephant huts and 
pill-boxes, scored by light railways; the roads on 
which no man might live in those days, them- 
selves alive with traffic in these, with lorries and 
men and all the abundant activities of a host 
behind a host. The car stopped one or two hun- 
dred yards from our destination, towards which 
we threaded our way over duck-boards, through 
and past these mushroom habitations, till we 
came to the green open space which was all that 
remained of the farm. Not a stone or a brick to 
be seen; not even a heap of bricks, or a charred^ 
beam, or the empty socket of pillar or post; only 
the two gate-posts themselves, looking like the 
stumps of trees. But what better than a gate- 
way to give a man his bearings? It led the bands- 
man straight to a regular file of such stumps, 
which really had been trees: and in his path stood 
a white cross, new and sturdy, at which I had 
been looking all the time: at which he stopped 
without looking twice, still studying the ground 
and the bits of landmarks that survived. It was 
the place. 

It was the boy's grave; and the discoverer's — 
nay, the diviner's — instinct stood vindicated as 
wonderfully as his evidence had been discredited. 
Almost adjoining it was a great shell-hole full of 
water ; but it was not our grave that the shell had 
rifled. Our grave had been dug too deep. It 
was as though the boy himself had said: "It's 
my grave all right — but I don't want you to go 
thinking those were my things! All that was 
me or mine is just as they left it." 



108 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

So we took off our helmets and stood listening 
to the young priest reading the last office, in 
Latin first and then in English. And many of 
the beautiful sentences were punctuated by loud 
reports, which I took for our guns if I thought 
of them at all; for as yet I had heard hardly any- 
thing else down south; but after the service I 
saw little black balloons appearing by magic in 
mid-air, expanding into dingy cloudlets, and pres- 
ently dissolving shred by shred. It was enemy 
shrapnel all the time. 

Then the two Sergeants prepared the ground 
with gentle skill; and we knelt and put in the 
narcissus bulbs, the primroses and pinks, the 
phlox and the saxifrage, that the boy's mother 
had sent him; and a baby rose-tree froni an old 
friend who loved him, in the corner of England 
that he loved best; it must be climbing up his 
cross, if it has lived to climb at all. 

The clouds had broken before the service ended 
with the sprinkling of Holy Water; and now be- 
tween the shell-bursts, while we were yet busy 
planting, came strains of distant music, as thin 
and faint and valiant as the February sunshine. 
It was one of our British bands, perhaps at prac- 
tice in some safe fold of the famous battlefield, 
more likely assisting at some ceremonial further 
away than I imagined; for they seemed to be 
playing very beautifully; and when they finished 
with "Auld Lang Syne'' they could not have hung 
more pathetically upon the closing bars if they 
had been playing at our graveside, for the boy 
who always loved a band. 



A BOY'S GRAVE 109 

Then there was his trench to see; but it was 
full of water where it had not fallen in, and was 
not like a trench any more. And the estaminet 
at the cross-roads, that cruelly warm comer 
whence he passed into peace, it too had vanished 
from the earth. But the gentle slope that had 
been No-Man's Land was much as he must have 
seen it in anxious summer dawns, and under the 
stars that twinkled on so many of his breathless 
adventures in the early bombing days, when he 
pelted Germans in their own trench with his own 
hand, and thought it all "a jaunt"; thought it 
"just like throwing in from cover"; declared it 
"as safe as going up to a man's front door-bell — 
pulling it — and running off again!" 

Well, this was where he had played those safe 
games; and true enough, it was not by them he 
met his death, but standing-to down there under 
shell-fire, on a summer's morning after his own 
heart, with eyes like the summer sky turned to- 
wards the same line of trees my eyes were be- 
holding now, his last thought for his men. I 
could almost hear his eager question : 

"Is everybody all right?" 

They were the boy's last words. 

Did I enter into the spirit of all that last chap- 
ter of his dear life the better for being on the 
scene, and watching shrapnel burst over it even 
as he had watched it a thousand times? I can- 
not say I did. I doubt if I could have entered 
into it more than I always had ... we were such 
friends. But how he must be entering into the 
whole spirit of my whole pilgrimage! It was 



110 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

like so much of his old life and mine. Al- 
ways he knew that he had only to call and I 
would come to him, at school or wherever he was; 
many a time I had jumped into a car and gone, 
though he never did call me in his life. Had he 
now? . . . There was my friend's car waiting, as 
it might have been once more in the Lane oppo- 
site "the old grey Chapel behind the trees." . . . 
And here were we passengers, a party from the 
four winds, all brought together by different agen- 
cies for the same simple end. Who had brought 
us? Who had prompted or inspired those directly 
responsible for our being there? It was not, you 
perceive, a case of one god from a machine, but 
of three at the very least. Who had so» beauti- 
fully arranged the whole difficult thing?' 

Even to that band! But for "Auld Lang Syne" 
one might not take it seriously for a moment; 
but remembering those searching strains, and the 
pathos put into them, the early hour, the wild 
place, the bursting shrapnel, who can help the 
flash of fancy? Not one who will never forget 
the boy's gay, winning knack of getting bands to 
play what he wanted; this was just the tune he 
would have called, that we might all join hands 
and not forget him, yet remember cheerily for his 
sake! 

But it all had been as he would have had it if 
he could: not one little thing like that, but the 
whole big thing he must have wanted : all granted 
to him or his without their mortal volition at 
any stage. Chances or accidents, by the chapter, 
if you will! No man on earth can prove the con- 



A BOY'S GRAVE HI 

trary; and yet there are few, perhaps, who have 
lost their all in this war, and who would not thank 
God for such a string of happenings. But one 
does not thank God for a chain of chances. And 
if any link was of His forging, why not the whole 
chain, as two thankful people dare to think? 



THE BOYS' WAR 
Consecration 

Children we deemed you all the days 

We vexed you with our care: 
But in a Universe ablaze, 

What was your childish share? 
To rush upon the flames of Hell, 

To quench them with your blood! 
To be of England's flower, that fell 

Ere yet it brake the bud! 

And we who wither where we grew, 

And never shed hut tears. 
As children now would follow you 

Through the remaining years; 
Tread in the steps we thought to guide, 

As firmly as you trod; 
And keep the name you glorified 

Clean before man and God. 



113 



V 
THE REST HUT 

Fresh Ground 

It was not my inspiration to run one of our huts 
entirely as a library for the troops. I was merely 
the fortunate person chosen to conduct the ex- 
periment. In most of the huts there was already 
some small supply of books for circulation, and 
at our headquarters in the town a dusty conges- 
tion of several hundred volumes which nobody 
had found time to take in hand. The idea was to 
concentrate these scattered units, to obtain stand- 
ard reinforcements from London and the base, in- 
dent for all the popular papers and magazines, 
and go into action as a Free Library at the Front. 
It was at first proposed to do without any kind 
of a canteen ; but I was all against driving a keen 
reader elsewhere for his tea, and held out for light 
refreshments after four and cigarettes all the time. 
On this and many other points I was given my 
way in a fashion that would have fired anybody 
to make the venture a success. 

The hut placed at my disposal was a very good 
one in the middle of the town, indeed within the 
palisade of the once magnificent Town Hall. That 
grandiose pile had been knocked into mountains 

115 



116 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

of rubbish, with the mere stump of its dizzy bel- 
fry still towering over all as the Matterhorn of 
the range. These ruins formed one side of a 
square like a mouthful of bad teeth, all hollow 
stumps or clean extractions; our upstart hut was 
the only whole building of any sort within sight. 
It had a better saloon than my last land-ship ; on 
the other hand, it was infested with rats from the 
surrounding wrecks. They would lope across the 
floor under one's nose, or dangle their tails from 
the beams overhead, and I slept with a big stick 
handy. 

Relays of peace-time carpenters, borrowed from 
their units for a day or two each, fell upon all 
the benches and table-tops they required, and 
turned them into five long tiers of book-shelves 
behind the counter. In the meantime our own 
Special Artist was busy on a new and noble 
scheme of decoration, and two or three of us up 
to our midriffs in the first thousand books. They 
were a motley herd: the sweepings of unknown 
benefactors' libraries, the leavings of officers and 
men, cunning shafts from the devout of all de- 
nominations, and the first draft of cheap master- 
pieces from the base. Classification was beyond 
me, even if time had been no object: how could 
one classify "The Soul of Germany," "A York- 
shireman Abroad," 'The Living Wage," "From 
Workhouse to Westminster: Life-Story of With 
Gooks, M.P." (four copies), or even the books 
these titles stood for in the typewritten cata- 
logue that arrived (from Paris) too late to enter- 
tain us? All authors in alphabetical order seemed 



THE REST HUT 117 

the simplest principle; and in practice even that 
arrangement ran away with days. 

Then each volume had to be labelled (over 
the publishers* imprint on the binding) and the 
labels filled in with the letter and number of each 
in one's least illegible hand; and this took more 
days, though the rough draft of the catalogue 
emerged simultaneously; and the merit of the 
plan, if any, was that the catalogue order even- 
tually coincided with that of the actual books on 
the shelves. The drawback was that books kept 
dropping in or turning up too late for insertion 
in their proper places. I could think of no better 
way out of this difficulty than by resorting to 
a large Z class, or dump, for late-comers. This 
met the case though far from satisfying my in- 
stincts for the rigour of a game. Another time 
(this coming winter, for instance, when I hope 
to have it all to do again) I shall be delighted 
to adopt some more approved method of dealing 
with a growing library; last spring one had to 
do the best one could by the light of nature. 
Nevertheless, there was not much amiss (except 
the handwriting) with the clean copy (in car- 
bon duplicate) of a catalogue which ran to a 
good many thousand words, and kept two of 
us out of bed till several successive midnights; 
for by this time I had a staunch confederate who 
took the whole thing as seriously as I did, and 
perhaps even found it as good fun. 

We had hoped to open — it was really very like 
producing a play — early in February, but a va- 
riety of vicissitudes delayed the event until the 



118 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

twentieth of the month. As the day approached 
we had many visitors, who had heard of our ef- 
fort and were prepared to spread our fame; time 
was well lost in showing them round, and I con- 
fess I enjoyed the job. They had to begin by 
admiring the scraper. It was perhaps the worst 
scraper in Europe — I ached for a week from sink- 
ing its two uprights into harder chalk with a 
heavier pick-axe than I thought existed — but it 
was symbolical. It meant that you could leave 
the mud of war outside our hut; but I am afraid 
the first thing to be seen inside was inconsistent 
with this symbol. It was the complete Daily Mail 
sketch-map of the Western Front, the different 
sheets joined together and mounted on the locked 
(door opposite the one in use. The feature of this 
display was that the Line was pegged out from 
top to bottom with the best red tape procurable 
in the town. It toned delightfully with the art- 
green of the sketch-map. 

In the ordinary Y.M.C.A. nobody would have 
seen it! In winter, at any rate, it is dusk at 
high noon in the ordinary hut, which is lighted 
only by canvas windows under the eaves. In our 
hut, however, we had a pair of fine skyhghts, 
expressly cut to save our readers' eyes, and glazed 
with some shimmering white stuff which seemed 
to increase the light, like a fall of snow, instead 
of shghtly diluting it like the best of glass. The 
side windows glistened with the same material, 
so that a dull day seemed to clear up as you 
entered. Between the skylights stood four trestle 
tables imder one covering of American cloth, 



THE BEST HUT 119 

whereon the day's papers, magazines and week- 
lies, were to be displayed club-fashion; the writ- 
ing tables, likewise in American cloth, were ar- 
ranged under the side windows; and at an even 
distance from either end of the fourfold reading 
table were the two stoves. One stove is the ordi- 
nary hut-allowance. 

Round each stove ran a ring of canvas and 
wicker arm-chairs, in which a tired man might 
read himself to sleep, and between the chairs stood 
little round tables for his tea and biscuits when 
he woke. They were garden tables painted for 
the part, with spidery black legs and bright ver- 
milion tops, and on each a nice new ash-tray (of 
the least possible intrinsic value, I admit) in fur- 
ther imitation of the club smoking-room. That 
was the atmosphere I wanted for the body of 
the hut. 

At the platform end we were ready for any- 
thing, from itinerant lecturers to the most local 
preacher, and from hymns to comic songs; the best 
piano in the area was equal to any strain; and 
a somewhat portentous rostrum, though not 
knocked together for me, was just my height, 
while the American cloth in which we found it 
was a dead match for our extensive importations 
of that fabric. It was at this end of the hut that 
our Special Artist and Decorator had excelled 
himself. All down the sides were his frieze of 
flags, his dado of red and white cotton in alternate 
stripes, and his own extraordinarily effective chalk 
drawings on sheets of brown paper between the 
windows. But for the angle under the roof, over 



120 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

the platform, he had reserved his masterpiece. 
One day, while we were still busy with the books, 
our handy man of genius had stood for an hour 
or two on a ladder; and descending, left behind 
him a complete allegorical cartoon of Literature, 
including many life-size figures in flowing robes 
busy with the primitive tools of one's trade. I 
am not an art critic, like my friend the war corre- 
spondent who ruthlessly detected faults in draw- 
ing, instead of applauding all we had to show 
him; to me, the pride of our walls was at least 
a remarkable tour de force. The Official Photog- 
rapher was to have come at a later date to wit- 
ness if I exaggerate. He left it too long. He 
may have another chance this winter. "Litera- 
ture" has been preserved. 

These private views too often started at the 
counter, because visitors had a way of entering 
through my room; but to see the library as I do 
think it deserved seeing, one had to turn one's 
back upon all I have described, and with a proper 
piety bear down upon the books. In their five 
long shelves, each edged and backed with the 
warm red cotton of the dado, and broken only 
by my door behind the counter, those thirty yards 
of good and bad reading were wholly good to see, 
on our opening day especially, before the first 
borrower had made the first gap in their serried 
ranks. There indeed stood they at attention, 
their labels at the same unwavering height as so 
many pairs of puttees (except the few I had not 
affixed myself) ; and I felt that I, too, had turned 
a mob into an army. 



THE EEST HUT 121 

Immediately over the top row, on a scroll ex- 
pertly lettered by our Special Illuminator (an- 
other of our talented band), its own new motto, 
from Thomas a Kempis, ran right across the hut: 

Without Labour there is no Rest; nor without 
Fighting can the Victory be Won, 

I really think I was as pleased with that, on 
the morning I thought of it in bed (having just 
decided to call the hut The Rest Hut) as Thack- 
eray is said to have been when he danced about 
his bedroom crying — " 'Vanity Fair' ! 'Vanity 
Fair!' 'Vanity Fair'!'' But I only once heard a 
remark upon our motto from the men, "Well, 
that's logic anyhow!" said one when he had read 
it out across the counter. I could have wished 
for no better comment from a soldier. 

Higher still, in the angle of the roof, at this 
end, the flags of the Allies enfolded the Sign of 
the Rest Hut, which was an adaptation of the 
Red Triangle. I was having a slightly more elab- 
orate version compressed into a rubber stamp for 
all literary matter connected with the hut. 

The rubber stamp did not arrive in time for the 
opening; nor had there been time to stick our 
few rules into more than a few of the books. But 
I had a paste-pot and a pile of these labels ready 
on the counter. And since we are going into de- 
tails, one may as well swing for the whole sheep : — 



122 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

THE REST HUT LIBRARY 

(y. m. c. a.) 

This book may be taken out on a de^ 
posit of 1 franc, which will be returned 
when the book is brought back. 

Books cannot be exchanged more 
than once daily, and no Reader is en- 
titled to more than one volume at a 
time, 

A book may be kept as long as re- 
quired; but in each other's interests 
Readers are begged to return all books 
as soon as they conveniently can, and in 
as good order as possible. 

Frankly, we flattered ourselves on dispensing 
with time-limit and fine; and in practice I can 
commend that revolutionary plan to other ama- 
teur librarians. Obviously you are much less 
likely to get a book back at all if you want more 
money with it. You shall hear in what circum- 
stances many of ours were to come back, and at 
what touching trouble to men of whom one can 
hardly bear to think to-day. 

But all the books were not for circulation; a 
Poetry and Reference Shelf bestrode my end of 
the counter. Duplicate Poets were to be allowed 
out like novels; but they were not expected to 
have many followers. A more outstanding fea- 
ture, perhaps the apple of the librarian's glasses, 
was the New Book Table, just in front of the 



THE REST HUT 123 

counter at the same end. I thought a tableful 
of really new books would be tremendously at- 
tractive to the real readers, that their mere ap- 
pearance might convey a certain element of mo- 
rale. So one long day I had spent upon fifteen 
begging letters to fifteen different publishers— 
not the same begging letter either, for some of 
them I knew and some knew me not wisely but 
too well. On the whole the fifteen played up, and 
the New Book Table was well and truly spread 
for the inaugural feast. The novelties were to 
grace it for a fortnight before going into the cata- 
logue; and we started with quite a brave display. 
There were travels and biographies, and new 
novels and books of verse, all spick-and-span in 
their presentation wrappers; and we arranged 
them most artistically on a gaudy table-cloth that 
cost thirty francs; with a large cardboard mug 
(by our Illuminator) warning other mugs off the 
course. And I think that really is the last of our 
preparations, unless I mention the receptacles for 
waste paper, which proved quite unable to com- 
pete against the floor. 

They were, I daresay, the most fatuously faddy 
and elaborate preparations ever made for a li- 
brary which might be blown sky-high at any mo- 
ment by a shell. I had not forgotten that none 
too remote contingency. But it was the last thing 
I wanted any man to remember from the moment 
he crossed our threshold. We were just about 
five miles from the Germans, and I had gone to 
work exactly as I should in the peaceful heart of 
England. But that was just where I wanted a 



124 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

man to think himself — until he stepped back into 
the War. 

Opening Day 

It really was rather like a first night; but there 
was this intimidating difference, that whereas the 
worst play in the world draws at least one good 
house, we were by no means certain of that meas- 
ure of success. Our venture had been announced, 
most kindly, in Divisional Orders, as well as ver- 
bally at the Y. M. Cinema; but still we knew 
it was not everybody who believed in us, and that 
"a wash-out'' had been predicted with some con- 
fidence. Even those in authority, who had most 
handsomely given me my head, were some of them 
inclined to shake theirs over the result. It was, 
therefore, an exciting moment when we opened 
at two o'clock on the appointed afternoon. There 
was more occasion for excitement when I had 
to lock the door for the last time some weeks later; 
and the two disappointments are not to be com- 
pared ; but my private cup has seldom filled more 
suddenly than when I unlocked it with my own 
hand — and beheld not one solitary man in sight! 
"A wash-out" was not the word. It was my 
Niagara. 

At least it looked like it; but after one bad 
quarter of an hour it turned into a steady trickle 
of repentant warriors. If the two of us had been 
holding a redoubt against the enemy, I am not 
sure that we should have been more delighted to 
see them than we were. In half an hour the big 
reading table was surrounded by solemn faces; 



THE EEST HUT 125 

each of the two stoves had its full circle in the 
easy chairs; the New Book Table had been dis- 
covered, was being thronged, and the best piano 
in the area yielding real music to the touch of 
a real pianist. The Rest Hut had started on its 
short but happy voyage. 

Those there were who came demanding candles 
and boot-polish, and who fled before our softest 
answers; and there were seekers after billiards 
who had to be directed elsewhere for their game. 
I had tipped too many cues at the last hut, and 
stopped too many games for the further perform- 
ance of that worse than thankless task, to have 
the essential quality of the Rest Hut subverted 
by a billiard-table. The readers, writers, mu- 
sicians, and above all the weary men of an Army 
Corps were the fish for my rod ; and we had not 
been open an hour before I was enjoying good 
sport, tempered by early misgiving about my 
flies. 

The first book that I connect with a specific 
inquiry was one that I had certainly failed to 
order. It was "anything of Walter de la Mare's" ; 
and I felt a Philistine for having nothing, but a 
fool for supposing for a moment that I had 
pitched my hut within the boundaries of Phi- 
listia. There might have been a conspiracy to 
undeceive me on the point without delay. The 
Poetry Shelf (despite deficiencies so promptly 
proven) received attention from the start. I for- 
get if it was Mr. de la Mare's admirer who pres- 
ently took out The Golden Treasury, of which we 
mercifully had several copies; it was certainly a 



126 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

Jock. I showed him the Shelf, and could have 
wrung his hand for the tone in which he mur- 
mured "Keats!" It was reverential, awe-stricken 
and just right. Clearly his Dominie had not 
abused the taws. 

In the meantime I had taken a deposit on three 
prose volumes. These were they, these the first 
three authors to cross my counter: 

1. George Meredith: The Ordeal of Richard 
Fever el. 

2. Robert Louis Stevenson : Across the Plains, 

3. Hilaire Belloc: Mr, Clutterbuck's Election. 
As I say, it seemed like a conspiracy — but I 

swear I was not one of the conspirators! They 
were — my benefactor already — the pianist, and 
his friends; three young privates in the R.A.M.C., 
all afterwards great friends of mine. Of course, 
this form was too good to be true of the mass; 
and the particular Field Ambulance to which they 
belonged was an unusually brainy unit, as I came 
to know it through many other representatives; 
but I shall always be grateful to that musical 
young Meredithian for the start he gave me, and 
may this mite of acknowledgment meet his spec- 
tacles. 

On the same opening page of my first day- 
book, to be sure, a less rarefied level is reached by 
some comparatively pedestrian stuff, including a 
work of Mr. Charles Garvice and no fewer than 
two wastrels "of my own composure" (as the 
village organist had it); but my place (though 
gratifying) was obviously due to an ulterior curi- 
osity; and among the twenty- three books in all 



THE REST HUT 127 

that went out that afternoon, there was a further 
burst of four that went far to restore the highei" 
standard. They were Lorna Doone, My Novel, 
Nicholas NicJdeby and Oliver Twist, The two 
first fell to Jocks; the Blackmore masterpiece 
was read forthwith from cover to cover in the 
trenches, and that Jock came down by special per^ 
mission for something else as good ! 

A happy afternoon, and of still happier omen! 
But I was going to need more "good stuff" ; that 
was the first hard fact to be faced. I had not 
reckoned with those eager intellectuals, the young 
stretcher-bearers who had borne a lantern for the 
nonce. They were going to bring their friends, 
and did; and were I to tabulate the books these 
youths took out between them, in the busy 
month to come, it would be pronounced, I think, 
as good a little library as a modern young man, 
with a sociological bias and a considered outlook, 
could wish to form. And then there were all the 
books we hadn't got for them! But these miss- 
ing friends did more, perhaps, to make friends 
for the Rest Hut than such as were there to 
close the subject; for one might be able to sug- 
gest something else instead; and the man might 
have read that already, but his face might lighten 
at the recollection, and across the counter on our 
four elbows the pair of us forge that absent book 
into the first link of friendship. 

But anyone can gossip about the books he loves, 
and with a soldier at the front any fool could 
talk on any topic. So I had it both ways, as 
one seldom does according to the saying. It may 



128 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

be that the men who found their pleasure in the 
Rest Hut were by nature responsive and enthu- 
siastic, and not merely sensitised and refined by 
the generous fires of constant camaraderie and 
unselfish suffering. I am speaking of them now 
only as I found them across that narrow counter, 
while I deliberately pasted my label of rules in- 
side the cover, and deliberately dabbed my rubber- 
stamp down on the fly-leaf opposite. I have seen 
clean into a noble heart between these delaying 
rites and a meticulous entry in my day-book. It 
was pain to me when three or four were waiting 
their turn, and a certain despatch became im- 
perative; it always meant a corresponding period 
without* any work or any friend-making across 
the counter. 

At the short end, beyond the flap (never low- 
ered in the Rest Hut) my friend and mate dis- 
pensed the cigarettes and biscuits, and tea made 
with devoted care by a wrinkled Frenchwoman 
worth all the Y.M.C.A. orderlies I ever saw, 
not excepting the two stalwarts at the Ark. The 
Rest Hut orderly was a smart soldier of the old 
type, a clever carpenter, and a good cook with 
large ideas about breakfast. He lived out, did 
not give us his whole time, and early struck me 
as a man of mystery ; but he was a quick and will- 
ing worker who did his part by us. The jewel of 
the hut's company was my mate. I can only 
describe him as an Australian Jock, and of the 
first water on both sides. Twice or thrice rejected 
in Australia, he had come home to try again and 
yet again with no better luck; so here he was, with 



THE REST HUT 129 

his fine heart and his dry cough, as near the firing- 
line as he could get "for the duration." I may- 
lose a friend for having said so much, yet I have to 
add that he had taken the whole burden of the till 
and its attendant accounts (a hut-dealer's busi- 
ness) off the shoulders of inexperience. Friends 
who predicted the worst of me in this connection, 
and are surprised to see me still outside a default- 
er's cell, will please accept the only explanation. 

It was a musical tea that opening afternoon, 
for another of our talented troupe brought the 
pick of his orchestra from the Association Cinema 
in the main street hard by; and for an hour it 
was like the Carlton, with a difference. I won- 
der what the Carlton could charge for that dif- 
ference, even at this stage of the war! 

Altogether I thought myself the luckiest civilian 
alive that February afternoon; but my bed of 
roses had its crumpled leaf. On the fine great 
cardboard programme for the week (next the 
map: our Illuminator again) with its cunning 
slots for movable amusements, besides that of 
the Cinema Orchestra there was something about 
Prayers. That was where I was coming in — on 
the wrong side of the counter— and as the night 
advanced it blew a gale inside me. Five minutes 
before the time, I mounted the platform and 
made known the worst; and ever afterwards fin- 
ished the evening by pursuing the same plan, 
so that all who wished could withdraw, losing 
only the last five minutes, and no man (I prom- 
ised them) have anything unpalatable thrust 
down his throat. I am not sure that it was the 



130 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

most courageous method of procedure; but it 
was mine, and the men knew where they were. I 
used to read a few verses, a Vaihma Prayer and 
but one or two more: some men went out, but 
there was the satisfaction of feeling that those 
;who stayed were in the mood for Prayers. 

After the first week or ten days, a third worker 
came to help us; and he being a minister, I per- 
suaded him to relieve me of this nightly duty, 
^though with a sigh that was not all relief. I al- 
ways loved reading to the men, but Prayers are 
shy work for an old layman, and soldiers (if I 
know them) care less for the deathless composi- 
tion of a Saint than for the unpremeditated 
outpouring of the man before their eyes. The 
minister used to give them all that, perched on 
a chair in their midst ; and he kept a much fuller 
hut than I at my rostrum of American cloth. 

The Hut in Being 

I had thought of finishing my account of our 
opening day with the impressions of a Corporal in 
the A.S.C., as recorded in his diary that very 
night. But though the extract reached me in a 
most delightful way, and though decency would 
have disqualified the flattering estimate of ''the 
Superintendent" (as ''a man of cheery tempera- 
men t'O, on examination none of it quite fits in. 
As description it covers, though with the fleeter 
pen of youth, ground on which I have already 
loitered: enough that it was all "a big surprise" 
to him: "a 'home from home'" akeady to one 



THE REST HUT 131 

soldier of a literary turn, and likely in his opin- 
ion to prove a joy to ''some of the lonely hearts 
of the lads in khaki"; Q.E.F, 

And though it was weeks and months before 
the Corporal's testimony came to hand, it felt 
from the beginning as though we really had "done 
it." I say "it felt," because there was something 
in those few thousand cubic feet of air that one 
could neither see nor hear; something atmos- 
pheric, and yet far transcending any atmosphere, 
whether of the smoking-room or library or what- 
not, that we had thought to create; for it was 
something the men had brought with them, noth- 
ing that we had ready. Just as they say on the 
stage that it is the audience who do half the act- 
ing, so it was the soldiers who fought half our 
little battles^ — and the winning half. 

Each of those first days the hut seemed fuller 
than the day before; more men came early and 
stayed late; more were to be counted napping 
round the stoves (as in my rosiest visions) at 
the same time ; more and more books were taken 
out; and better books, because it was the better- 
educated men who came flocking in, the intel- 
lectual pick of an Army Corps who made our hut 
their club. If ever a dream came true, if ever a 
reality excelled an ideal, it was in the wonder- 
ful success of our little effort. Little enough, 
in all conscience; a bubble in the tide of travail; 
but it is only in little that these delightful flukes 
come off, and the bubble was soon enough to 
burst. 

In the meantime, there were elements of im- 



132 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

perfection even in our Rest Hut: one or two 
things, and on both sides of the counter, to pique 
a passion for the impeccable. 

To begin with the books, we really had not 
enough Good Stuff. Not nearly! Nor am I 
thinking only, nor yet chiefly, of Good Stuff in 
the shape of narrative fiction. It is true that we 
had not Merediths enough, nor a supply of Wes- 
sex Novels in any way equal to the demand 
among my Red Cross friends (who read infer- 
nally fast) and others of the elect; nor did the 
two complete Kipling sets, ordered long before 
the library was opened, ever look like coming. 
These authors we had only in odd volumes, and 
few were the nights they spent upon their shelves. 
But a novel-reader is a novel-reader, one can 
generally find him something; my difficulty was 
in coping with another type altogether — the real 
bookworm — who is far more particular about his 
food. Anything but novels for this gentleman 
as I knew him at the front; and he was often 
the last person one would have suspected of his 
particular tastes, sometimes a very young gen- 
tleman indeed. There was one such, a rugged 
lad with a strong Lancashire or Yorkshire accent, 
whom I thought I should never suit. Lamb, 
Emerson, Ruskin and Carlyle, he demanded in 
turn as glibly as Woodbines or Gold Flakes: 
but either I had them not, or they were out. 
Macaulay's Essays happened to be in. "The lit- 
erary ones?" said the boy, suspiciously, to my sug- 
gestion. "I don't want the political!" I remem- 
ber he took a Golden Treasury in the end; as 



THE BEST HUT 133 

already noted, I had several copies, and needed 
every one. 

Then I found that I required a better selection 
of technical works of all sorts. Engineers, espe- 
cially, want engineering books and journals; it is 
a rest to the fighting man to pursue his peace- 
time interests or studies at the front. Nothing, 
one can well imagine, takes him out of khaki 
quicker; and that is what his books are for, nor 
will he shut them a worse soldier. Of devotional 
works, as I may have hinted, we opened with a 
fair number; this was increased later by a strong 
consignment from Tottenham Court Road. But 
it was impossible to be too strong on that side — 
with a Division of Jocks in the sector! 

"It's the only subject that interests me," said 
a tight-lipped Scottish Rifleman, quite simply, 
on the third day. He was not a man I would have 
surrendered ta with much confidence on a dark 
night, but he had brought back a book called 
The Fact of Christ, and he wanted something else 
in the same category. Just then there was noth- 
ing; but with imbecile temerity I did say we had 
a number of "religious novels," by a lady of great 
eminence. "I^m no a believer in her/' was his 
only reply. I can still see his grim ghost of a 
smile. Himmel help the Hun who sees it first! 

The young man vanished for his sixteen days, 
and in his absence came the bale of theology 
from Tottenham Court Road. 

"Now I've got something for you," said I, when 
I saw his keen face again ; and lifted off its shelf 
Dr. Norman Macleod's most weighty tome. I 



134 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

cannot check the Parisian typist who rendered 
the title Caraid 7ian Gaidherl; the subject, how- 
ever, was the only one that interested the Scot- 
tish Eifleman, and I took the tongue for his very 
own. My mistake! 

"But that'll be in Gaelic," said he, without open- 
ing the book ; ''I have never studied Gaelic, though 
a Highlander born. Now, had it been Hebrew," 
and he really smiled, "I micht have managed!" 

I saw he might; for obviously he had been a 
theological student when he felt it incumbent 
upon him (especially as such) to play a Jock's 
part in the Holy War. I saw, too, that his smile 
was shy and gentle in its depths, only grim on 
top. I think, after all, he would have given his 
last cigarette to a prisoner of anything like his 
own manhood. 

But there was one worse failure than any de- 
ficiency on our shelves, and that, alas! was my 
own poor dear New Book Table. I had not looked 
after it as I ought, and neither had my friend 
and fellow-worker; in my eagerness to keep our 
respective departments ideally distinct, this fancy 
one had fallen between two stools. Several of 
the new books were missing before we actually 
missed one; then we took nightly stock, and with 
mortifying results. At last it could go on no 
longer, and the new books were replaced by old 
bound volumes of magazines, more difficult to 
deport. But I was determined to have it out 
with the hut; and I chose the next Sunday eve- 
ning service, in the course of which I made it a 



THE REST HUT 135 

rule to have my say about things in general, for 
the delicate duty. 

I didn't a bit like doing it, as I held my regular 
readers above suspicion, and they formed the 
bulk of the little congregation; and that night I 
was in any case more nervous than I meant them 
to see, as for once I had decided to tackle the 
"sermon" myself. It was the first evening of 
Summer Time; lamplight was unnecessary; and 
the splendid men sitting at ease in the armchairs, 
which they had drawn up to the platform end, 
or at the tables or on the floor, made a great pic- 
ture in the soft warm dusk. One candle glim- 
mered at the piano, and one on that egregious 
rostrum, as I stood up behind it and trembled in 
my boots. 

I told them the New Book Table had ceased 
to exist as such; that I had prostrated myself 
before fifteen of my natural enemies, in order 
to spread that table to their liking; but that there 
had been so many desertions from my crack 
corps that we were obliged to disband it. Not 
quite so pat as all that, but in some such words 
(and to my profound relief) I managed to get a 
laugh, which enabled me to say I thought it hard 
luck on the ninety-and-nine just persons that the 
hundredth man should borrow books without go- 
ing through the preliminary formalities. But, I 
added, that if they came across any of the desert- 
ers and would induce them to return to their 
unit, I should be greatly obliged. They were 
jolly enough to clap before I launched into my 
discourse, and it was what their rum ration 



136 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

must have been to them. I wish as much could 
be done for poor deacons before going over their 
top. 

But the point is that at least one deserter did 
return next day; and what touched me more, the 
little gifts of books, which they had taken to 
bringing me for the library, increased and multi- 
plied from that night. Nor must I forget the 
humorist (not one of my high-brows) who but- 
ton-holed me on my way back to the counter: — 

"Beg yer pardon, Mr. 'Ornung, but that pinch- 
in' them new books — wasn't a Raffles trick, was 
it?" 

But if we failed where I had thought we were 
doing something extra clever, we met with great 
success in a less deliberate innovation for which 
I can claim but little credit. 

In our quiet hut there was no need for the 
usual Quiet Room; but there it was, at the plat- 
form end, as much use as in the heart of the Great 
Sahara. I had thought of turning it into a little 
informal sort of lecture-room, for readings and 
other entertainments which might not be to 
everybody's taste. But I had no time to organise 
or run a side-show; neither of us had a spare 
moment in the beginning. Though we never 
opened in the morning, except to officers who 
cared to come in as friends, there was plenty tc 
do behind the scenes — parcels of new books to 
unpack and acknowledge, supplementary cata- 
logues to prepare — all manner of preparations and 
improvements that took the two of us all our 



JHE REST HUT 137 

time. Then my second mate, the Minister, fell 
from Heaven — for he was just our man. 

He had made a hobby of the literary evening in 
his Border parish; had come out armed with a 
number of vivacious appreciations of his favour- 
ite authors, the very thing for our Quiet Room. 
I handed it over to him forthwith, and we em- 
barked together upon a series of Quiet Room 
Evenings, which I do believe were a joy to all 
concerned. At any rate we always had an au- 
dience of forty or fifty enthusiasts, who took part 
in the closing discussion, and in time might have 
been encouraged to put up a better lecture than 
either of us. The minister, however, was very 
good; and what he had cut out, in his unselfish 
pursuit of brevity, I could sometimes put into 
a more ponderous performance at the end. It was 
a greater chance than any that one got on Sun- 
day evening; for though I promise them there 
was never any previous idea of improving the 
occasion, yet it was impossible to sit, pipe in 
mouth, chatting about some great writer to that 
roomful of thinking, fighting men, and not to 
touch great issues unawares. Life and death — 
wine and women — I almost shudder to think what 
subjects were upon us before we knew where we 
were! But a great, big, heavenly heart beat back 
at me, the composite heart of fifty noblemen on 
easy terms with Death; and if they heard any- 
thing worth remembering, it came from them- 
selves as much as though they had written the 
things down and handed them up to me to read 
out. I have known an audience of young school- 



138 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

boys as kindlingly responsive to a man who loved 
them ; but here were grown soldiers on the battle's 
brink ; and their high company, and their dear at- 
tention, what a pride and privilege were they! 

If only it had been earlier in the season, not 
the very hush before the hurricane ! There were 
so many lives and works that we were going to 
thresh out together — Francis Thompson's, for one. 
He had crept into our evening with Edgar Allan 
Poe. I had promised them a long evening with 
Francis; the stretcher-bearers, especially, were 
looking forward to it as much as I was; but I 
had to send for the books, and they were not in 
time. 

And on the last of these Quiet Room Eve- 
nings, a young lad in a Line regiment had stayed 
behind and said : 

"May we have a lecture on Sir John Ruskin, 
sir?" 

I said of course they might — but I was not 
competent to deliver it myself. His books were 
on the way, however, for there had been more 
than one inquiry for them. They also arrived too 
late. 

I had never seen the boy before, nor did I 
again. I may this winter. He shall have his "lec- 
ture on Sir John Ruskin" — if I have to get it up 
myself! 

Writers and Readers 

For my own ends I kept a kind of librarian's 
ledger, in which was entered, under the author's 



THE REST HUT 139 

name, every book that ever went out, together 
with its successive dates of departure and return. 
This amateurish scheme may not have been worth 
the labour it entailed, in spare moments at the 
counter or last thing at night, after a turnover of 
perhaps a hundred volumes, many of which need- 
ed new labels before retiring to the shelf. But I 
was never sorry I had let myself in for it. The- 
oretically, one had only to look up a book in this 
ledger to tell whether it was in or out; but in 
practice my reward was not then, but is now, 
when I can see at a glance who really were our 
popular authors, and which books of theirs were 
never without a partner, and which proved wall- 
flowers. 

Statistics, however, are notoriously bad wit- 
nesses; and some of mine would not stand cross- 
examination. Thus, take him for all in all, the 
author of The First Hundred Thousand may add 
the blue ribbon of the Rest Hut to his collection ; 
but then, we had practically all his books, and 
some of them four or five deep. Nor was the one 
that had more outings than anything of any- 
body's on our shelves on that account the most 
popular; it may even have been the author's 
nearest approach to a bad penny. On the other 
hand, our four copies of The First Hundred Thou- 
sand were out almost as long as we were open, 
and all four "failed to return.'' As for its sequel, 
our only copy eloped with its first partner: had 
all our authors been Ian Hays there would have 
been no carrying on the library after the first 
hundred thousand seconds. 



140 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

The run on these two books was the more note- 
worthy in view of the fighting reader's distaste 
for "shop." It was the flattering exception to a 
very human rule ; for I find, taking a good many 
days at random, that while all but thirteen of 
every hundred issues were novels, less than three 
of the thirteen were books about the war. Some 
forty-nine readers out of fifty wanted something 
that would take them out of khaki, and nearly 
nine out of ten pinned their faith to fiction. 

How many preferred a really good novel is an- 
other and a more invidious matter; but nothing 
was more refreshing than the way the older mas- 
ters held their own. Dickens was in constant 
demand, especially among the older men; and 
they really read him, judging by the days the 
immortal works stayed out. Again it was worth 
noting that here in France A Tale of Two Cities 
had twice as many readers as Pickwick, which 
came next in order of popularity. Thackeray 
was not fully represented, but we had all his best 
and they were always out. Of the Brontes we 
had next to nothing, of Reade and Trollope far 
too little; but It is Never too Late to Mend en- 
chanted a Sapper, a Machine Gunner, and a Red 
Cross man in turn, while Orley Farm would have 
headed our first day's list had it been there in 
time. George Eliot was never without readers, 
but Miss Braddon had more, and The Woman in 
White only one! After Dickens, however, the 
most popular Victorian was the first Lord Lytton. 

I confess it rejoiced my heart to hand out the 
protagonists of a belittled age at least as freely 



THE KEST HUT 141 

as their "opposite numbers" of the present cen- 
tury. But I had my surprises. Scott (Sir Wal- 
ter!) was a firm wall-flower for the first fortnight; 
probably the Jocks knew him off by heart; and, 
of course, the same thing may apply to their un- 
natural neglect of the so-called Kale-yard School 
of other days. There was, at any rate, nothing 
clannish about their reading. It Was a Jock 
who took The Unspeakable Scot for its only air- 
ing; and more than three-fourths of my Steven- 
sonians were Sassenachs. But one could still con- 
jure with the name of Stevenson, as with many 
another made in his time. Mr. Kipling's soldiers 
are adored by legions created in their image. 
Sir H. Rider Haggard was never on the Rest 
House shelf. Messrs. Holmes and Watson were 
the most flourishing of old firms, and Gerard the 
only Brigadier taken seriously at my counter. 
Ruritania, too, got back some of its own trippers 
from the Five Towns; for though you would have 
thought there was adventure enough in the air 
we breathed, there was more realism, and it was 
against the realism we all reacted. Mr. Bennett, 
to be sure, did not occupy nearly enough space 
in our capricious catalogues; neither, for that 
matter, did Mr. Weyman, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. 
Vachell, nor yet Miss Marie Corelli or Sir Thomas 
Hall Caine. The fault was not mine, I can assure 
them. 

Mr. H. G. Wells, on the other hand, utilised a 
better chance by tying with the author of Arsene 
Lupin, and just beating Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, 
for a place it would be unprofitable to compute. 



142 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

Even they could not live the pace of Mr. Charles 
Garvice, who in his turn succumbed to the lady 
styled the Baroness Horsy by her fondest slaves; 
to these two and to Miss Ethel Dell, among others 
I have or have not presumed to mention, I could 
wish no greater joy than my job at that counter 
when their books were coming in, and "another 
by the same author, if you've got one,'' being 
urgently demanded in their place. The most en- 
thusiastic letter ever written for an autograph 
could not touch the eager tone, the live eye, the 
parted lips of those unconscious tributes. It is 
not the look you see in Mudie's as you wait your 
turn; but I have seen it in small boys chasing 
pirates with "Ballantyne the Brave,'' and in one 
old lady who fell in love every Sunday of her dear 
life with the hero of The Family Herald Supple- 
ment. It was even better worth seeing in a sol- 
dier with Just a Girl in his ruthless hand, and 
The One Girl in the World trembling on a rever- 
ential tongue. The man might have been per- 
forming prodigies of dreadful valour up the Line, 
but his soul had been on leave with a lady in 
marble halls. 

There were two young Privates in the A.S.C. 
who bolted their Garvice at about two days 
to the book; and two trim Corporals of the 
Rifle Brigade who made as short work of the 
other magicians. This type of reader always 
hunted in couples, sharing the most sympathetic 
of all the passions, if not the books themselves, 
which would double the rate of consumption. 
They were the hard drinkers at my bar; but the 



THE BEST HUT 143 

hardest of all was a lean young Jock, who smiled 
as hungrily as Cassius, and arrived punctually at 
six every evening to change his book. He looked 
delicate, and was, I think, like other regular at- 
tendants, on light duty in the town ; in any case, 
he took his bottle of fiction a day without fail, 
and once, when it was raining, drained it under 
my nose and wanted another. I refused to serve 
him. Unlike the other topers, he was a sardonic 
critic. One night he banged the counter with 
a book in my own old line, and the invidious com- 
ment: 

"He can do what you no can!" 

I said I was sure, but inquired the special point 
of superiority. 

"He can kill his mon as often as'he likes," said 
McCassius, grimly, "and bring him to life again. 
Fufty times he has killed yon mon — fufty times!" 

They were very nice to me about my books — 
but very honest! There was a certain stretcher- 
bearer, a homely old fellow with a horse-shoe 
moustache and mild brown eyes; not from the 
highbrow unit, but perhaps a greater reader than 
any of them; and one of those who eschewed the 
novel. Scenes of Clerical Life (on top of Leno- 
tre's Incidents of the French Revolution, and our 
two little volumes of Elia) had been his only dis- 
sipation until, our friendship ripening, he weighed 
me with his tranquil eyes and asked for Raffles, 
I seemed to detect a streak of filial piety in the 
departure, and gave him as fair warning as I 
could; but only the book itself could put him 
off. He returned it without a word to temper his 



144 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

forgiving smile, and took out The Golden Treas- 
ury as a restorative. Poetry he loved with all his 
gentle soul; but when, at a later stage, he asked 
if I thought he could ^learn to write poetry/'^ the 
wounds of vanity were at least anointed. 

He used to take down Mr. David SomervelFs 
capital Companion to the Golden Treasury, from 
the Poetry Shelf; and it was delightful to watch 
his bent head wagging between text and note, a 
black rimmed forefinger creeping down either 
page, and his back as round as it could possibly 
have been before the war. He told me he was a 
Northhamptonshire shoemaker by trade; and 
though you would trust him not to scamp a sole 
or bump a stretcher, there was nothing to show 
that the war meant more to him than his last, or 
life more than a chance of reading — the shadow 
lengthening in the sunshine that he found in 
books. Once I said how I envied him all that he 
had read; very gently — even for him — he an- 
swered that he owed it all to his mother, who had 
taught him when he was so high, and would be 
eighty-one come Tuesday. The man himself was 
only forty; but he was one of those guileless crea- 
tures who make one unconsciously look up to 
them as elders as well as betters. And at the 
front, where the old are so gloriously young, and 
the young so pathetically old, nothing is easier 
than to forget one's own age; often enough mine 
was brought home to me with a salutary shock. 

^'When I was up the Line," said one of my 
friends, bubbling over with a compliment, "a chap 
3aid to me, Tou know that old — that — that el- 



THE REST HUT 145 

derly man who runs the Rest Hut? He's the 
author of Raffles.' " 

Disastrous refinement! And the fellow grinned 
as though he had not turned what might have 
been a term of friendship into one of pure oppro- 
brium. Elderly! One would as lief be labelled 
Virtuous or Discreet. 

Another of my poetry-lovers did really write it 
— ^but not his own — there was too much of a 
twinkle in his brown eyes! They were twinkling 
tremendously when I saw them first, fixed upon 
the Poetry Shelf, and the tightest upper lip in 
the hut seemed to be keeping down a cheer. No 
sooner had we spoken than he was saying he kept 
his own anthology in his field pocket-book — and 
could I remember the third verse of ^'Out of the 
night that covers me"? Happily I could; and 
so made friends with a man after my heart of 
hearts. 

In the first place, he spoke the adorable accent 
of my native heath, or thereabouts; and the things 
he said were as good as the way he said them. 
Sense and sensibility, fun and feeling, candour 
and reserve, all were there in perfect partnership, 
and his twinkling eyes lit each in turn. Before 
the war he had been a postal telegraphist, and 
"there wasn't a greater pacifist alive" ; now he was 
an R.E. signaller attached to the Guards, and 
as for pacifism — the twinkle sharpened to a glit- 
ter and his upper lip disappeared. 

Yet another man of forty, he had joined up 
early and assigned any credit to his wife, "good 
lass!" He was splendid about her and their 



146 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

cheery life together; there was a happy marriage, 
if you like ! ^^Ever a rover," as he said romanti- 
cally (but with the twinkle), he might be in a 
post-office, but his heart was not; and it seemed 
the couple were one spirit. Every summer 
they had taken their holiday tramping the 
moors, their poets in their pack: "when we were 
tired we would sit down and read aloud." No 
wonder the Poetry Shelf made him twinkle! 
There were two cheery children, "shaping" as 
you would expect; their dad borrowed my // to 
copy out for the small boy's birthday, as well as 
in his field anthology. 

Loyalty to one's own, when so impassioned, is 
by way of draining the plain man's stock : perfect 
home lives are not so common that the ordinary 
middle-aged ratepayer makes haste to give up one 
for the war. But the anthologist had not been 
"wrapped up" like the rest of us. His loyalties 
did not even end at his country. That first after- 
noon, I remember, he told me he had been "a bit 
of a Theosophist." 

"Aren't you one now?" 

"No ; but I still have a warm comer in my heart 
for them." 

I thought that very finely said of a creed out- 
lived. Give me a warm corner for an old love, be 
it man, woman, or sect! 

Daily he dropped in to read and chat; not to 
take out a book until his turn came for the Line. 
It was just when the German push seemed immi- 
nent to many, was indeed widely expected at a 
date when my friend would still be at his danger- 



THE REST HUT 147 

ous post. He knew well what it might mean at 
any moment; and I think he said, 'The wireless 
man must be the last to budge," with the smile 
he kept for the things he meant; but for once 
his eyes were not doing their part. ''Well, thank 
God I've had it!" he said of his happy past as 
we locked hands. "And nothing can take it away 
from you," I had the nerve to say; for these may 
be the comforts of one's own heart, but it seems 
an insolence to offer them to a younger man with 
a harder grip on life. Happily we understood 
each other. "And many happy chats had we," 
he had written on the back of the photograph he 
left me. He had also written his wife's address. 
David Copperfield went with him when we part- 
ed. I wondered if I should ever see either of them 
again. 

Sure enough, on the predicted night, came the 
roll of drum-fire, as like thunder as a noise can 
be; but it was our drum-fire, as it happened, and 
down came my friend next day to tell me all about 
it. No Man's Land had been "boihng like cocoa" 
under our shells; he was full of the set-back 
administered to Jerry, of the fun of underground 
wireless and the genius of Charles Dickens. I 
sent him back with Joseph Vance, and we talked 
of nothing else at our next meeting. It was our 
last; but I treasure a letter (telling of "the ruined 
city of our friendship," among other things), and 
a field-card of more recent date; and have every 
hope that the writer is still lighting up under- 
ground danger-posts with his wise twinkle, and 
still adding to his field anthology. 



148 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

Yet another hard reader was a Coldstream 
Guardsman, a much younger man, and one of 
the handsomest in the hut. He, too, if you will be- 
lieve me, had brown eyes — a thing that could not 
happen to three successive characters in a novel 
— but of another order altogether. If they had 
never killed a lady in their time, their molten 
glow belied them. This young man liked a clas- 
sic author of full flavour. Tom Jones was prob- 
ably his favourite novel, but we had it not. De 
Maupassant would have enchanted him — but not 
the coarse translations on vile paper — or Rous- 
seau^s or Cellini's open secrets. As it was, he had 
to put up with Anatole France and oddments of 
Swift and Wilde; nor do I forget his justifiable 
disgust on discovering, too late, that our Gulliver 
was a nursery version. He was a delightful com- 
panion across the counter: subtle, understanding, 
soft-spoken, in himself a romantic figure, yet 
engagingly vulnerable to romance. 

"I'm feeling sentimental, Mr. Hornung. I want 
a love-story," he sighed one afternoon. I re- 
minded him that he would also want Good Stuff, 
and succeeded in meeting all his needs with Ships 
That Pass in the Night. 

Next day we had our Quiet Room Evening with 
Tom Hood ; and that was the time I strayed upon 
delicate ground by way of The Bridge of Sighs, 
from poem to subject before I knew where I was. 
The men took it beautifully, and touched my heart 
by impulsively applauding the very things I 
should have feared to say to them upon reflection. 
As for our Coldstreamer, he came straight up to 



THE REST HUT 149 

the counter and took out Jeremy Taylor's Holy 

Living and Dying! 



War and the Man 

Not a day but some winning thing was said or 
done by one or other of them. A man whom I 
hardly knew had been changing his book when he 
heard me talking about green envelopes. 

"Do you want a green envelope?'' he asked 
point-blank. 

"As a matter of fact, I do." 

"Then I'll see if I can't get you one." 

Now, the point about the "green envelope" is 
the printed declaration on the outside that the 
contents "refer to nothing but private and fam- 
ily matters" ; this being signed by the sender, your 
letter is censorable only at the base, and will not 
be read by anybody with whom you are in daily 
contact. There is, I believe, a weekly issue of 
one of these envelopes per man. This I only re- 
membered as the generous soul was turning away. 

"Don't you go giving me anything you want 
yourself!" I called after him. 

He just looked over his shoulder. "Then it 
wouldn't be much of a gift, would it?" was all he 
said ; but I shall never give a copper to a crossing- 
sweeper without trying to forget his words. 

That man was a driver in the R.H.A., and be- 
yond the fact that he had just been reading The 
White Company I know nothing about him. 
They cropped up under every cap-badge, these 
crisp, articulate, enlightening men; they had shak- 



150 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

en off their marching feet the dust of every walk 
in civil life, and it was only here and there a tena- 
cious speck caught the eye. I have heard a South- 
ern in Jock's clothing work in a word about the 
season-ticket and the ^^silk hat" of his City days; 
but as a rule a soldier no more thinks of trading 
upon his civilian past than a small boy at a Pub- 
lic School dreams of bragging about his people. 
More than in any community on earth, the man 
at the front has to depend upon his own person- 
ality, absolutely without any extraneous aid what- 
soever; and the knowledge that he has to do so is 
a tremendous sharpener of individuality. 

Yet your arrant individualist is the last to see 
it. I remember recommending The Private Pa- 
pers of Henry Ryecroft to a young man full of 
brains and sensibility — one of that Field Ambu- 
lance to which, as we saw it, the description applies 
in bulk. He came back enthusiastic, as I knew he 
would, and we discussed the book. I quarrelled 
with the passage in which Gissing rails at the 
weekly drill in his school playground : "even after 
forty years" the memory brought on a "tremor of 
passionate misery. . . . The loss of individuality 
seemed to me sheer disgrace." My Red Cross 
friend applauded the sentiments that I deplored ; 
himself as individual as a man need be, he assured 
me that the Army did crush the individuality out 
of a man; and when, refraining from the argu- 
mentum ad hominem, I called his attention to 
many others present who showed no sign of such 
subdual, he said at any rate it happened to the 
weak:er men. 



THE REST HUT 151 

It may: and if a man has no personality of his 
own, will he be so much the worse for the compos- 
ite substitute to be acquired in the Army? Bet- 
ter an efficient machine than a mere nonentity; 
but an efficient machine may be many things be- 
sides, and, under the British system, nearly always 
is. The truth is that discipline and restriction do 
not "crush" the normal personality in the least. 
They compress it; and compression is strength. 
They prevent a man from "slopping over"; they 
conserve his essence. They may not "make a 
man" of one who is a man already, but they do 
exalt and intensify the quality of manhood; they 
do make a good man in that sense better, and a 
goodish man out of many a one who has been ac- 
counted "no good" all his life. 

Often when the hut was full of magnificent 
young life; bodies at their very best, perfect in- 
struments in perfect tune; minds inquisitive, re- 
ceptive, experienced beyond the dreams of pre- 
war philosophy, and honest as minds must be on 
the brink of Beyond ; often and often have I looked 
down the hut and compared the splendid fellows 
I saw before me with the peace-time types percep- 
tibly represented by so many. Small tradesmen, 
clerks, shop assistants, grooms and gardeners, 
labourers in every overcrowded field, what they 
were losing in the softer influences of life, that 
one might guess, but what they were gaining 
all the time, in mind, body, and character, that 
one could see. It did not lessen the heart- 
break of the thought that perhaps half would 
never see their homes again; but it did console 



152 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

with the conviction that the half who survived 
would be twice the men they ever would or could 
have been without the war. Nay, they were twice 
their old selves already, if I am any judge of a 
man who talks to me. I only know I never fore- 
gathered with a couple of them without feeling 
that we were all three the harder and yet the 
tenderer men for our humble sacrifices, our aching 
hearts and our precarious lives. I never looked 
thoughtfully upon a body of these younger broth- 
ers without thinking of the race to spring from 
loins so tried in such a fire. Never — if only be- 
cause it was the first comfort that came to mind. 
But it was not the only one. Here before my 
eyes, day after day, were scores of young men, not 
only "in the pink," but in better ''form" than per- 
haps they themselves suspected; not only in- 
tensely alive but manifestly enjoying life, the cor- 
porate life, of constant comradeship and a com- 
mon, if subconscious, excitement, to an extent 
impossible for them to appreciate at the time. 
They put me in mind of a man I know who vol- 
unteered for South Africa in his athletic youth, 
and has ever since been celebrated among his 
friends for the remark of a lifetime. Somebody 
had asked him how he liked the Army. "The 
Army?" cried this young patriot. ''Once a soldier, 
always a civilian!" None the less, he was one of 
those I met in France, a Major in the A.S.C., 
which he had joined (under a false age) at the 
beginning of the war. And how many, now the 
first to adopt his watchword, would not jump at 



THE BEST HUT 153 

the chance to emulate his deed in another fifteen 
unadventurous years! 

Many, we are told, will anticipate the inconceiv- 
able by making their own adventures, if not their 
own war on society, such are the brutalising ef- 
fects of war! In this proposition there is prob- 
ably as much as a grain of truth to a sandhill of 
imbecility ; but we shall hear of that grain on all 
sides; the soldier-criminal will be only too cer- 
tain of a copious press, the bombing burglar of 
his head-line. The people we are not going to 
hear about, and have no desire to recognise as 
such, are the rascals reformed, the weak men 
strengthened, the prodigals born again in this 
war, and at least less likely to die a second death- 
in-life. With all my heart I believe that, with 
few exceptions, the only characters which will 
have suffered by the war are those of such young- 
ish men as have managed to stand out of it to 
the end, and men of all ages and all conditions 
who have failed throughout to put their personal 
considerations in their pockets, and left it to 
other men and other men's sons to die or bleed 
for them. I hope they are not more numerous 
than the men who have been ^'brutalised'' by war. 
At all events there were no successful shirkers 
about our huts in France; and that may have 
made the atmosphere what it was. All might not 
have the heart for war; here and there some sapi- 
ent head might wag aloof; but at least all had 
their lives and bodies in the cause, there were no 
safe skins, no cold detachment, no complacent 
lookers-on. It was an atmosphere of manhood 



154 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

the more potent for the plain fact that no man 
regarded himself as such in any marked degree, or 
for one moment in the light of a hero. 

That is all I have to say about their heroism. 
It is an absolute, like the beauty of Venus or the 
goodness of God. Daily and hourly they are ris- 
ing to heights that keep all the world always won- 
dering — when, indeed, it does not kill the power 
of wonderment. But their dead level, the level 
on which I saw them every day, lies high enough 
for me. It is not only what discipline has done for 
them, not only what the habit of sacrifice has 
made of them, that appeals and must appeal to 
the older man privileged to mix with soldiers at 
the front. It is also the wonderful quality of his 
fellow-countrymen as revealed in these tremen- 
dous years. That was there all the time, but it 
took the war to show it up, it took the war to make 
us see it. I might have known that rough poor 
lads were reading Ruskin and Carlyle, that a 
Northamptonshire shoemaker was as likely as any- 
body else to be steeped in Charles Lamb, or a 
telegraph-clerk and his wife to tramp the York- 
shire dales with Wordsworth and Keats about 
their persons. Yet I, for one, more shame for me! 
would never have imagined such men if the God 
of battles had not put me to school in my Rest 
Hut for one short half-term. 

Neither could I have invented, at my best or 
worst, a young City clerk who played the piano 
divinely by the hour together, or a very shy young 
man, a chemist^s assistant from the most unhal- 
lowed suburb, for whom I had to order Bee- 



THE REST HUT 155 

thoven and Chopin, Liszt and Brahms and Schu- 
mann, because he could play even better, but not 
from memory. Those two lads were the joy of 
the hut, of hundreds who frequented it. And 
how much joy had they given in their lodgings or 
behind the shop? Who had ever been prouder of 
them than their comrades, or done so much to 
"bring them out"? Yet, need I say it? they both 
belonged to that clever, intellectual, fascinating 
Field Ambulance to which the Rest Hut owed so 
much ; and I shouldn't wonder if they both agreed 
with that other nice fellow, their thoroughly indi- 
vidual comrade who declared that "the Army 
crushes the individuality out of a man!" 



SHELL-SHOCK IN 

(1918) 

All night they crooned high overhead 

As the skies are over men: 
I lay and smiled in my^ cellar bed, 

And went to sleep again. 

All day they whistled like a lash 
That cracked in the trembling town: 

I stood and listened for the crash 
Of houses thundering down. 

In, in they came, three nights and days, 

All night and all day long: 
It made us learned in their ways 

And experts on their song. 

Like a noisy clock, or a steamers screw, 
Their beat debauched the ear. 

And left it dead to a deafening few 
That burst who cared how near? 

We only laughed when the flimsy floor 
Heaved on the shuddering sod: 

But when some idiot slammed a door — 
My God! 



157 



VI 

"WE FALL TO RISE" 

Before the Storm 

That dramatic month would have been memor- 
able for the weather if for nothing else. Day 
after day "the March sun felt like May," if ever 
it did; and though it dried no hawthorn-spray 
in the broken heart of our little old town, and 
there was neither blade nor petal to watch a-blow- 
ing and a-growing, yet Spring was in our nostrils 
and we savoured it the more eagerly for all we 
knew it must bring forth. Then the overshadow- 
ing ruins took on glorious hues in the keen sun- 
light, especially towards evening; the outer grey 
so warm and soft, like a mouse's fur; the inner 
lining, of aged brick, an even softer tone of its 
own, neither red nor pink. Day after day a clean 
sky threw the jagged peaks into violent relief, 
and high lights snowed their Matterhorn, until a 
sidelong sunset picked the whole chain out with 
shadows like falls of ink. It was a sin to spend 
those afternoons indoors, even in the Rest Hut, 
where the two stoves stood idle for days on end, 
and all the windows open. 

Then there were the still and starry nights. 
Then there were the moonlight nights, not so 

159 



160 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

still, but nothing very dreadful happening our 
way. Our big local gun might have gone on 
tour; at least I seem to remember many a night 
when it did not shake us in our beds, when indeed 
there was little but the want of sheets and pillow- 
eases to remind us that we were not in England, 
where, after all, one can hear more guns than are 
noticed any longer, and an aeroplane at any hour 
of the twenty-four. Many a night there was no 
more than that to remind us that we were only 
just behind the Line. Sometimes, as the two of us 
sat last thing over a nice open fireplace that had 
found its way into my room from one of the skele- 
ton houses on the opposite side of the square, 
one or other would fall to moralising upon the past 
life of the place we had made so much our own. 
It was a dutiful effort to remember that the Hotel 
de Ville had not always been a mangled pile, its 
palisaded courtyard once something other than the 
site of a Y.M.C.A. hut. But the reflection failed 
to haunt us as it might have done; the present 
and the living were too absorbing, to say nothing 
of the imminent future ; and as for the dead past, 
we had our own. And yet we knew from guide- 
book and album what shining pools of par- 
quet, what ceilings heavily ornate, what monu- 
mental intricacies in wood and stone, what crys- 
tal grandiosities, formed the huge rubbish-heaps 
between the mouse-grey walls with the reddish 
lining: we knew, but it was no use trying to care. 
The Hotel de Ville had finished its course; the 
Rest Hut was just getting into its stride. Another 
chunk off the stump of the once delicate and dizzj; 



'*WE FALL TO RISE'' 161 

belfry, what did it signify unless the chunk came 
through our roof? That was our only anxiety in 
the matter, and we debated whether such a chunk 
would fly so far, or fall straight down, as apparent- 
ly the rest of the campanile had done before it. 
My chief mate, however, wound up every debate 
with the reiterated conviction that there would be 
no German push at all; they were "not such fools'^ 
as to make one. But for my part I never went to 
bed without wondering whether that would be the 
last of our quiet nights, or a quiet night at all. 
And deadly quiet they had grown; even the rats 
no longer disturbed us; every one of them had de- 
parted, and for no adequate reason within our 
knowledge. Even the sceptic of a mate had some- 
thing trite but sinister to say about "a sinking 
ship." . . . 

One afternoon, two days before the date on 
which most people seemed to expect things to 
happen, a harbinger arrived as I sat perched be- 
hind the counter. We were not long open; most 
of the men present were clustered round the news- 
paper table; you really could have heard some pins 
drop. That was why, for a second or two, I did 
hear something I had never heard before, and 
have no wish to hear again. It sounded exactly 
like a miniature aeroplane approaching at phe- 
nomenal speed. I was just beginning to wonder 
what it was when there followed the most extraor- 
dinary crash. Not an explosion; not a breakage; 
but the loud flat smack a dining-table might make 
if you hauled it up to a ceiling by its castors and 



162 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

let it fall perfectly evenly upon a bare floor. It 
was the roof, however, that had been hit. 

We went out to look, and one of the men picked 
up a fragment of shell, only about three inches 
long and less than an inch wide. That was my 
table-top. The jagged edge of it glittered as 
though incrusted with tiny brilliants; but the 
fragment was quite cold, showing that it had 
travelled far since the burst. "One of our Ar- 
chies,'' said most of the men; but the Rest Hut 
orderly, who wore a Gunner badge, said lacon- 
ically: "Fritz — range-finding!" He was borne 
out by a High Commander who honoured me 
with a visit some days later. I believe it was 
the first bit of German stuff that had found its 
way into the middle of the town since the previous 
November; and a very interesting and effective 
little entry it made, in the quietest hour of one 
of those uncannily quiet days, and in the precincts 
of what we flattered ourselves was the quietest hut 
on any front. But the funny (and rather disap- 
pointing) thing was that it had failed to leave so 
much as its mark upon our roof. It must have 
skimmed the apex and glanced off the downward 
slope^ — convex side down — as a stone glances off a 
pond. "The little less," and it would have drilled 
the reverse slope like a piece of paper. I have 
often thought of that cluster of forage caps, under 
the silky skylights, round the central table; but 
what I shall always hear, plainer than the terrific 
smack that left no mark, is that first little singing 
whirr as of a dwarf propeller of gigantic power. I 



*'WE FALL TO RISE'' 163 

think that must be the most sickening sound of all 
under heavy shell-fire in the open. 

Next day was the eve of the expected attack, 
which did not in point of fact take place for an- 
other week and more ; but how widespread was the 
expectation we learnt for ourselves by our own 
small signs and portents. A dozen francs were 
refunded on a dozen books whose borrowers were 
afraid they would have no more time just then to 
read another; but when it all blew over for that 
week, back they came with their deposits, and 
out went more books than ever. The mate was 
jubilant. Of course there had been no German 
attack; and never would be; they were not such 
fools! Nor was he by any means alone in his 
opinion; many ofl&cers — but enough! We were 
not, to be sure, by way of meeting many ofl&cers. 
And yet Wednesday, March 20th, brought two -to 
my room whose respective deliverances are worth 
remembering in the light of subsequent events. 

One was the Gunner who had given me steak 
and onions on our All Uppingham day in the 
dark depths of the earth. He was as cheery as if 
he had been making another century in the Old 
Boys' Match, instead of having just gone on with 
his heavies on a new pitch altogether. It was go- 
ing to suit him. He felt like getting wickets. 
And the Pavilion was not a dug-out this time; 
it was an elephant, in which the Major and he 
could put me up any night I liked. Why not that 
night? He had come in a car; he could take me 
back with him. 

Why not, I sometimes wonder to this day! 



164 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

There were good, there were even creditable, rea- 
sons; but, beyond the fact that I was now much 
attached to my counter, I honestly forget what 
they were. I only know that my hospitable 
friend's new wicket was one of the first to be 
overrun by a field-grey mob; and though the 
Major and he are still enjoying rude health on 
the right side of the Line, and it goes without 
saying that they left the ground with becoming 
dignity, I am afraid I should have been out of 
place in the procession. Exciting moments I must 
have had, but I should have been sorry to play 
Anchises to my friend's ^Eneas. And I was to 
have my little moments as it was. 

My other visitor was, curiously, another cricket- 
er, whom I had first seen bowling in the Univer- 
sity match at Lord's. It is not his department of 
the greater game ; nor do I intend to compromise 
this officer by means of any further clue; for he 
it was who informed me that the push was really 
coming before morning. *'So they say," he smiled, 
and we passed on to matters of more immediate 
interest. Time enough to be interested in the 
push when it did come; from all reports I was 
likely to find myself in the stalls, and he of course 
would be on the stage. So that was that. In 
the meantime I had a great fixture arranged and 
billed for the Saturday evening. An old friend 
was coming over from the Press Chateau to lec- 
ture in the Rest Hut, for the first time on any plat- 
form; there were to be seats for all our other 
friends, officers and men, and some supper in my 
room for half-a-dozen of us and the lecturer. It 



'*WE FALL TO RISE" 165 

was of this we talked, and probably of pre-war 
cricket, and my beloved men, over the last quiet 
tea I was to have there. Books went out very 
freely till we closed. With Our Faces to the Light, 
Heroes and Hero-Worship, The Supreme Test, 
and Our Life After Death were among the last 
half-dozen titles! 



Another Opening Day 

... It did not wake me up till four or five in 
the morning. Then I knew it had begun. The 
row was incessant rather than tremendous; nol; 
nearer than it had often been, when that big local 
gun was at home, but indubitably different. Some 
supplementary sound followed most of the re- 
ports, as the receding swish of a shattered breaker 
follows the first crash. I guessed what it was, 
but I wanted to be sure. I wanted to ask the 
mate, on the other side of the partition behind 
my head; but I didn't want to wake him up on 
purpose. The only unnerved man I met in France, 
one of our workers whose railway-carriage had 
been blown in by a bomb on the last stage of his 
journey from the coast, had awakened the man in 
the next bed for company's sake the night after. 
He was brave enough to own it. I wanted com- 
pany, but I had not the hardihood to sing out 
for it until I heard a movement through the 
partition. 

The mate, of course, did not believe it was the 
push; but he confessed it sounded the sort of 
thing one would expect to hear if the Germans 



166 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

were fools enough to make a push. It sounded 
like rather distant thunder, with sporadic claps in 
the middle distance. I smoked a pipe with my 
Spectator before trying for some more sleep, and 
was just dropping off when our orderly arrived 
with jaunty tread. 

"It's Fritz," said he, with sardonic unconcern. 
"You can hear the houses coming down.'' 

And there followed the tale of damage done so 
far. 

I am afraid we were both up with the wind, if 
not with the sun. But we shaved without blood- 
shed; for it is remarkable how a shell-burst can 
fail to jog your elbow, or to spill your tea, when 
you have been educated up to that type of distur- 
bance. We had grown so used to guns in the night 
that the quiet nights were the uncanny ones; and 
even they were generally punctuated first or last 
by a comfortable bang from the local heavy; the 
"All's Well!" of that night-watchman, which, if 
it woke us up, only encouraged us to go to sleep 
again with an increased sense of security. A 
shell-burst at a decent distance sounded much the 
same for the first — and only startling — second. 
And all that morning, and generally throughout 
the day, they kept their distance with quite unex- 
pected decency. 

But they did sing over our heads ; they did keep 
the blue above us vocal with their shrill whining 
cries; it was astounding to look up into the unruf- 
fled heavens and see no trace of their course. As 
one gazed, the crash came in the streets a few 
hundred yards away; and often after the crash, 



"WE FALL TO RISE*' 167 

by an interval of seconds, a noise as of some huge 
cart shooting its rubbish. Somebody said it was 
like a great lash whistling over us and cracking 
amid the herd of living houses just beyond. It 
really was; and what followed was the groan as 
yet another piece was taken out of the palpitat- 
ing town. 

Two things came home to us while the day was 
young. It was biggish stuff that was coming in, 
at a longish range ; and it was coming in on busi- 
ness, not on pleasure. Its business was to feel 
for barracks, batteries, and other sound invest- 
ments for valuable munitions; not to have a 
sporting flutter here, there, and everywhere; much 
less to indulge in the sheer luxury of pestling a 
ruined area to powder. If or when they made 
some ground, and brought up their field-guns, it 
would be a different matter; then it might pay 
them to keep us skipping in all parts of the town 
at once; but, for the present, we in our part were 
in quite ignoble security — unless Fritz lost his 
strength ^ We had, however, to remember that we 
were in a straight line between wicket and wicket; 
nor did his singing deliveries give us much chance 
of forgetting the fact. 

News was not long in reaching us from less for- 
tunate localities. The station was catching it; 
and we had a busy hut all but adjoining the sta- 
tion. We looked upon our comrades at the Sta- 
tion Hut with mingled envy and commiseration, 
when one or two of them dropped in to recount 
their adventures and escapes. A short-pitched 
one had killed four officers in the street in their 



168 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

direction. And it so happened that business took 
me to the spot during the course of the morning. 

It would be idle to pretend it was an enjoy- 
able expedition. A friend went with me ; we wore 
our shrapnel helmets, and everybody we met was 
wearing his. That alone gave the streets an al- 
tered appearance; otherwise everything wore its 
normal aspect; the March sun was more like May 
than ever, the sky more innocently blue, the cool 
light hand of spring softer and more caressing. On 
the way we met two chaplains of the Guards, who 
gave us details of the tragedy; on its scene we saw 
clean wounds on the stone facing of a house, the 
chipped places standing out in the strong sun- 
light, but did not investigate too closely. Two 
of the ofl&cers had been standing in the doorway, 
two crossing the open space we skirted ; two had 
been killed outright, and two were dying or dead 
of their wounds. Shells whistled continuously as 
we walked, but not one burst before our eyes. 

On my return the mate and I had a look at a 
dungeon under the Town Hall, as a possible sleep- 
ing-place. It was part of an underground system 
for which the town was famous. One could walk 
for miles, from chamber to chamber, as one can 
crawl from cell to cell in the foundations of most 
big houses. We had long talked of going to ground 
there, with all our books, in the day of battle; and 
now we viewed provisional sites, though only one 
.of us allowed that the day had dawned. 

"This is not the push," I was stoutly assured. 
'This is only a feint, man. They are not 
such fools . . ." 



''WE FALL TO RISE'' 169 

After lunch we opened to the bang and whistle 
of our own guns, for a change. The sacred mid- 
day meal was never followed up by enemy gun- 
fire in my hearing; the time-table obviously in- 
cluded a methodical siesta, which it was our daily 
delight to spoil. Not that my Rest Hut crowd be- 
trayed much pleasure in the proceedings; for once, 
indeed, I could not help thinking them rather a 
stolid lot. There they sat as usual under the 
sunny skylights, dredging the day's news as though 
it were the one uninteresting thing in the hut, or 
playing dominoes and draughts, like a nursery- 
ful of unnaturally good children. It is difficult 
to describe their demeanour. To say that they 
looked as though nothing was happening is to 
imply a studied unconcern; and there was cer- 
tainly nothing studied on their side of the coun- 
ter; on ours, it seemed as if the Rest Hut had only 
needed this external din to make it really restful. 

"Our friend Jerry's a bit saucy this morning," 
said the emissary of a sick Sergeant who sent for 
a fresh Maurice Hewlett every day that week. It 
was the first comment of the afternoon on the 
day's events. "Our friend Jerry" had risen from 
his siesta and was giving us whistle and bang for 
our bang and whistle; and still every shot sounded 
plumb over the hut. It was like the middle of a 
tennis-court during a hard rally; but I never 
heard anybody suggest that either side might hit 
into the net. 

Then, I remember, came a newcomer, a husky 
lad with a poisoned wrist. 

"Gimme one o' them books." 



170 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

I had my formula in such cases. 

"Who is your favourite author?'' 

"Don't know as I have one; gimme any good 
yam." 

"What's the best yam you ever read?" 

"I don't often read one." 

"The last you did read?" 

Lost in the mists. I set The Hound of the Bas- 
kervilles on him, and saw him well bitten by the 
book before the afternoon was out or the bombard- 
ment by way of abating. There was no tea-inter- 
val on the other side, that I remember; but we 
had ours as usual in my room, and it was either 
that afternoon or the next that an eminent Ox- 
ford professor, out on a lecturing tour, gave us 
his company. He was delightfully interested in 
the library, and spent most of the afternoon be- 
hind the counter, making out a list of books he 
talked of sending us, chatting with the men, and 
endearing himself to us all. I daresay he was the 
oldest man who had ever entered the hut; but I 
still see him perched on top of our little home- 
made step-ladder, in overcoat and muffler and 
soft felt hat, while the shells burst nearer, or at 
any rate made more noise, as the day drew in. 
Book in hand, and a kindly, interested, quizzical 
smile upon his face, the professor looked either 
as though he never heard one of them, or as 
though he had heard little else all his life. He 
cheered one more than the cheeriest soldier, for 
his was not the insensibility of usage, but the self- 
less preoccupation of a lofty soul. 

Earlier in the week I had accepted an invitation 



'^WB FALL TO RISE*' 171 

to dine that evening with a mess at the other end 
of the town. It was quite the wrong end for din- 
ner at such a time ; it was the end where the Ger- 
man shells were feeling about for things worth 
smashing. They kept skimming across the streets 
as I found my way through the dusk, and ours 
came skimming back; it was the tennis-court 
again, but this time one seemed to be cross- 
ing it on gigantic stilts, head and shoulders above 
the chimney-pots. But nothing happened. It 
was a seasoned mess, all Padres and doctors, to 
the best of my recollection ; and they gave one a 
confidence more welcome than all their conscious 
hospitality. I enjoy my evening immensely — as 
I look back. 

There was a window at each end of the dinner- 
table. No sooner were we seated than there oc- 
curred outside one of these windows about the 
loudest explosion I ever heard. No chair was 
pushed back, and I am bound to say that was the 
end of it; they said it was further off than I can 
yet believe. They also seemed to think it was a 
bomb. There I trusted they were right. Bombs 
cannot go on falling on or even about the same 
place. But in fifteen minutes to the tick we had 
the same thing outside the other window. This 
time the glass came tinkling down, and it was 
thought worth while to inquire whether there were 
any casualties in the kitchen. There were none. 
No doubt some chair would have been pushed back 
if the answer had been in the affirmative. 

And that was all, except a great deal of shell- 
talk, and comparison of hair-breadth escapes, be- 



172 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

tween my two hosts (both of whom had borne 
charmed lives — but who has not, out there?) 
when the rest were gone, and a shower of stuff 
in the soft soil of the garden as I was going my- 
self. Perhaps "shower" is too strong a word; but 
one of the many things I can still hear is the 
whizz and burial of at least one lethal fragment 
close beside us in the dark. The kind pair in- 
sisted on walking back with me and were strong 
in their advice to me to seek a cellar for the night. 
This being their own intention, and the idea that I 
found in the mind of my mate on regaining the 
Rest Hut, he and I spent the next hour in trans- 
ferring our beds and bedding to the dungeon afore- 
said, where I for one slept all the better for the 
soothing croon of shells high overhead in waking 
intervals. 

It was officially computed that over eight hun- 
dred large shells arrived in our little town that 
day, the historic 21st March, 1918. 



The End of a Beginning 

Two capital nights we passed in our ideal dun- 
geon. It was deep yet dry, miraculously free from 
rats, and so very heavily vaulted, so tucked away 
under tons of debris, and yet so protected by the 
standing ruins, that it was really difficult to imag- 
ine the projectile that could join the party. There 
was, to be sure, a precipitous spiral staircase to 
the upper air, but even it did not descend straight 
into our lair. Still, a direct hit on the stairs would 
have been unpleasant; but one ran as much risk 



**WE FALL TO RISE'' 173 

of a direct hit by lightning in peace-time. It 
seems indecent to gloat over a safety verging on 
the ignoble at such a time ; but those two nights it 
was hard to help it; and the dim morning light 
upon the warm brick arches, bent like old shoul- 
ders under centuries of romance, added an appeal 
not altogether to the shrinking flesh. 

The day between had been very like the first 
day. I thought the bombardment a shade less vio- 
lent; but worse news was always coming in. Far 
fewer books were taken out, far fewer men had 
their afternoon to themselves, but only too many 
were their tales of bloodshed, especially on the 
outskirts of the town. They told them simply, 
stoically, even with the smile that became men 
whose turn it might be next; but the smile stopped 
short at the lips. Still worse hearing was the fall' 
of village after village in sectors all too near our 
own; and yet more sinister rumours came from 
the far south. Our greatest anxieties were nat- 
urally nearest home, and our chief comfort the un- 
ruffled faces of such officers as passed our way. 
"He seems to be meeting with some success, too!" 
as one vouchsafed from his saddle, after an open- 
ing in the style of the gentleman who was still 
demanding Hewletts for his Sergeant. 

The second night we had a third cellarman, 
leader of one of the outlying huts now being 
abandoned every day. Almost hourly our head- 
quarters were filling up with refugee workers, 
flushed with their sad adventures ; but this young 
fellow had been through more than most; a man 
had been killed in his hut, and he himself was in 



174 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

the last stages of exhaustion. He had been fast 
asleep when we descended from the turmoil for 
our night of peace ; and fast asleep I left him in 
the morning, little thinking that most of us had 
spent our last night in the neighbourhood. 

It was another of those brilliant days we shall 
remember every March that we may live to see. 
The devil's choristers were still singing through 
the blue above, still thundering their own applause 
in the doomed quarter of the town. Yet to stand 
blinking in the keen sunlight, snuffing the pure, 
invigorating air, was to vote the whole thing weak 
and unconvincing. The picturesque ruins were not 
real ruins. The noises were not the noises of a 
real bombardment; they were too simple and too 
innocuous, one had heard them better done upon 
the stage. It seemed particularly impossible that 
anything could happen to me, for instance, at the 
head of my cellar stairs, or to the very immaculate 
Jocks' Padre picking his way towards me, over a 
mound of last year's ruins, to us as old as any 
other hill. 

But it was that Padre who struck the sinister 
note at once. What were we going to do? Do! 
His meaning was not clear to me; he made it clear 
without delay. His Jocks — our Jocks — the rocks 
of my military faith ! — had gone away back. Di- 
visional Headquarters, at all events, had shifted 
out of that; it was the same with the other Di- 
visions in the Corps, the Padre thought; and he 
took it we should all be ordered back if we didn't 
go! A place with a ridge had been taken by the 
enemy, who had only to get his field-guns up — 



**WE FALL TO RISE^' 175 

and that was only a question of hours — to make 
the town a great deal unhealthier than it was al- 
ready. 

I was horrified. It was the one thing I had 
never contemplated, being turned out of the little 
old town! After all, it had been an unhealthier 
spot a year ago than it yet threatened to be- 
come again. A year ago the very Line had curled 
through its narrow rim of suburbs; and yet the 
troops had stuck to the town; there had been 
cellarage for all, barricades in streets swept by 
machine-guns, and a Y.M.C.A. hut run by a 
valiant veteran through thick and thin. One 
or two of us, at least, had been prepared for the 
same thing over again, plus our Rest Cave and 
all our books at a safe depth underground. That 
prospect had thrilled and fascinated ; the one now 
foreshadowed seemed too black to come true. 

But at breakfast we had it ofiicially from the 
mere boy (from a Public School, however) in local 
charge of the lot of us. We had better get packed ; 
it would be safer; but he hoped, perhaps more 
heartily than any of us, that the extremity in view 
would not arise. So we pulled out kit-bags and 
suit-cases of which we had forgotten the sight — 
and my jolly little room never looked itself again. 
No room does, once you start packing the belong- 
ings that made it what it was; but I never hated 
that hateful job so much in all my life. Nor did 
I ever do it worse — which is saying even more. 
Two days and nights under continuous shell-fire, 
even when it is only the music of those spheres 
that he hears incessantly, does find a man out in 



176 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

one way or another. My way was forgetfulness 
and, I fear, a certain irritability. There are some 
of my most cherished little possessions that I shall 
never see again, and a good friend or so with whom 
I fear I was a trifle gruff. I hope they have for- 
given me. But a shell-burst may be easier to bear 
than a pointless question, especially when you are 
asking one or two yourself. 

At lunch-time the A.P.M. sent in for me. I 
found him outside in the sun, with the D.A.A. and 
Q.M.G., I think it was — both of them very grave 
and business-like in their shrapnel helmets, their 
gas-masks hooked up under their chins. They, 
too, wanted to know what we proposed to do; 
they, too, explained exactly why the town would 
presently become no place for any of us. But it 
was not for me to speak for the other workers, 
who by this time were most of them on the spot; 
we were all as sheep in the absence of our Public 
School shepherd, who had gone off in the Ford 
to seek instructions at Area Headquarters. Some 
of them, indeed, took the opportunity of speaking 
for themselves; and who had a better right? It 
may be only my impression that we all had a good 
deal to say at the same time: I know I voiced my 
dream about the Rest Cave. The official faces 
were not encouraging; indeed, they put their dis- 
couragement in words open to an ominous con- 
struction. They did not say Janiculum was lost, 
but they left us perhaps deservedly uneasy on the 
point. 

And it was all idiotically, if not shamefully, ex- 
asperating! Those heavy shells still raining into 



''WE FALL TO RISE*' 177 

the town ; untold pain and damage ensuing every 
minute; the town-crier with his bell even then 
upon his rounds, warning civilians to evacuate; 
little parties of them already under way, here a 
toothless old lady in her Sunday weeds, a dignified 
old gentleman pushing a superannuated perambu- 
lator full of household gods, a prancing terrier 
loving the sad excitement of it all; and a man old 
enough to know better thinking only of his make- 
shift hut, hardly at all about their lifelong homes, 
compulsorily abandoned in their poor old age, 
yet with a step so proud and so unfaltering! The 
perambulator, perhaps, was now a nobler and a 
sadder treasure than any it contained. But just 
then the hut was home and treasure-house to me; 
filled day by day with hearts of gold and souls of 
iron; and now what would become of it and them! 

For the first time since the first day of all, no- 
body was there when we opened; but presently 
a handful drifted in, as unconcerned as the ter- 
rier in the road, but without a symptom of the 
dog's ingenuous excitement. What was it to them 
if the day was big with all our fates! It would 
not be their first big day; but it was not their day 
at all just yet, whatever it might to be us. To 
them it was still a May day come in March, the 
air was still charged with the fulness of life, and 
the hut with all that they had found in it hith- 
erto. It was only to us, in our narrow, keen expe- 
rience, that everything was spoilt, or spoiling be- 
fore our eyes. 

"It's too good a day to waste in war," said one 
of them across an idle counter. 



178 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

It was not his first utterance recorded in these 
notes; and there seemed a touch of affectation 
about it. But he was one of the clever lot I liked, 
and what I thought his self-consciousness only 
drew us closer ; for I defy you to live under shell- 
fire, for the first time, without thinking of your- 
self, and what the next moment may mean to you 
• — and what the moment after — at the back of your 
mind. It is another thing when your hands are 
full. But the peculiar traffic at our counter had 
dwindled steadily during the bombardment. And 
it had lost even more in character than in bulk. 
Impossible, at least for me, to keep up the tacit 
pretence that a book was more important than a 
battle; it had taken our visitor from Oxford 
(whom I suspect of an eager assent to the proposi- 
tion) to turn a really deaf ear to the song and 
crash of high explosive. Mine was hardened, but 
it heard everything; my mind employed itself on 
each report ; and for the last two days the men and 
I had been talking War. 

But to this young man I talked about his friends 
whom I might never see again. He had brought 
back a bundle of their books, and in their names 
he thanked me for my "kindness" to them, as if 
it were all on one side ! As if they had not, all of 
them, done more for me than I for them ! They 
were doing things up to the end; bringing back 
their books, at their plain inconvenience, on their 
way to the forefront of the fight; even bringing 
me, to the eleventh hour, their little offerings of 
books, the last tokens of their good-will. 

It was hard to tell them we were closing down, 



''WE FALL TO RISE'' 179r 

it might be only for a day or two; harder still 
to say what one felt without striking an unhelp- 
ful note ; and I took no risks. We could only re- 
fuse their money all the afternoon, entertain them 
as best we could, and pack them off with a hand- 
grip and "Good luck!'^ 

There was trouble, too, behind the scenes. Our 
dear old Madame was one of those for whom the 
town-crier had rung a knell ; by half -past three she 
must be out of house, home, and native place. But 
it was not the shipwreck of her simple life that 
brought the poor soul in tears to the hut. All the 
world knows how the homely French take the per- 
sonal tragedies of war, with the national shrug and 
a dry eye for their share of the national burden; 
and Madame was French to her finger-tips. She 
was therefore an artist, who put her hand to noth- 
ing she was not minded to finish as creditably as 
the good God would let her. Think, then, of her 
innocent shame at having to deliver our week's 
laundry wringing wet from the mangle I It was 
the last mortification; and all our protestations 
were powerless to assuage the sting to her sensi- 
bilities. As for her helpmate, our orderly, for all 
his capabilities he had never replaced the two 
heroes of the other hut in my affections; and at 
this juncture he had managed to get a little drunk. 
But from information since received one can only 
wonder it did not happen oftener; for the man 
had tragedy in his life, and his story would be 
the most dramatic in these pages had I the heart 
to tell it. By us he had done more than his duty, 
and for the hut almost as much as Madame her- 



180 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

self. The last sight of each was saddening, and 
yet a part of the closing scenes, as the pair had 
been part of our lives. 

By half-past five the Y.M.C.A. men had their 
orders: all to evacuate except four of the youngest 
or strongest, who might stay for the present to 
help with the walking wounded. Only too natur- 
ally, the Rest Hut was not represented among the 
chosen. But permission was given us to remain 
open another hour; and there were perhaps a doz- 
en readers under the still sunny skylights to the 
end. It went hardest of all to tell them they would 
have to go. Two or three looked up from the 
papers to ask in dismay about their lecture. I 
had forgotten there was to have been a lecture; 
but here were these children waiting to take their 
places for the promised treat, and more came 
later. Nothing all day had illustrated quite so 
graphically the difference between their point of 
view and ours; to them bursting shells, falling 
houses, and emptying town were all in the day's 
work. They had to carry on just the same; it 
was more than distasteful to be obliged to point 
out that we could not. The lecturer, I said, if 
he was still alive, would be in the thick of things 
by this time. That went home; he is the man 
they all read, the man who has sung the praises 
of the private soldier with an understanding en- 
thusiasm unsurpassed by any war correspondent 
in any war. A week earlier the hut would have 
been full to bursting; it shall burst if they like 
one night this winter — all being better than that 
Saturday in March — and a war still on ! 



''WE FALL TO RISE'' 181 

A regular patron of our Quiet Room Evenings, 
an oldish man with a fine scorn stamped upon his 
hard-bitten face, said one or two things I valued 
the more as coming from him, though I doubt if 
we had exchanged a dozen words before. I shook 
his hand, and all their hands, as they went out. 
They were pleased with us for having kept open 
a day longer than any of the other huts. I hope 
I said the other huts had been closed by order; 
but I only remember wanting to say a great deal 
more, and thinking better of it. After all, we had 
understood each other in that hut to a degree 
beyond the need of heavy speeches. 

The Road Back 

There was a strange lull in the firing, and no 
meal-time to account for it, as I carried the bag- 
gage over piecemeal to our headquarters off the 
opposite end of the little square. The mate was 
doubtless busy relieving me of my final respon- 
sibilities in the matter of stores or accounts; at 
any rate I remember those two or three halting 
journeys with his light and my heavy kit. The 
sun was setting in a slight haze, as though the 
air were full of gold-dust. The shadows of the 
crippled houses lay at full length in the square. 
The big guns were strangely still ; their field-guns 
were taking them a good long time to mount upon 
the captured ridge. I made my final trip, turned 
in under the arch at headquarters, where the little 
Ford 'bus was waiting for the last of us, and inci- 
dentally for my last and lightest load. I had not 



182 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

put it in when those mfernal field-guns got going. 

I do not know what happened in other parts 
of the town. It seems unlikely that they opened 
fire on our part in particular, but as I stood talk- 
ing in a glass passage there came a whirlwind 
whizz over the low roofs, a crack and a cloud in 
the adjoining courtyard, and, as I turned back 
under the arch, another whizz and another bang 
in the street I had just quitted. So I would have 
sworn in perfect faith; and for several minutes 
the street was full of acrid smoke, to bear me out. 
But it seems the second burst was in the next 
house, or in the next but one. All I can say is 
that both occurred within about fifteen paces of 
the spot where I stood as safe as the house that 
covered me. And yet the soldiers tell you they 
prefer shell-fire in the open ! With great respect, 
I shall stick up for the devil I know. 

But what has interested me ever since is the 
hopelessness of expecting two persons to give 
anything like the same account of a violent ex- 
perience which has taken them both equally by 
surprise. Nor is it necessary to go gadding about 
the front in order to test this particular proposi- 
tion; try any couple who have been in the same 
motor accident. It must be done at once, before 
they have time to compare notes; indeed, they 
should be kept apart like suspect witnesses in a 
court. Suspicion will be amply vindicated in nine 
cases out of ten; for the impression of any acci- 
dent upon any mind depends on the state of that 
mind at the time, on the impressions already 
there, and on its imaginative quality at any tune. 



^ 



''WE FALL TO RISE" 183 

Hence the totally different versions of the same 
event from three or four equally truthful persons. 
A boy I had known all his life was killed just 
before I went out: three honest witnesses gave 
three contradictory descriptions of the tragedy. 
Two of the three were all but eye-witnesses, and 
C. of E. Chaplains at that! No wonder we ar- 
gued about our beggarly brace of shells. The 
chief mate (last to leave the ship, by the way) 
heard three, and a fourth as we drove away in the 
Ford. My powers of registration were only equal 
to the two described. 

It was good to be high and dry in the little 
'bus, though it would have been better with as 
much as the horn to blow to keep one's mind out 
of mischief. Our driver was a fine man wearing 
the South African and 1914 ribbons. Invalided 
out, he had wormed his way back to France in 
the Y.M.C.A.; but it was a soldier's job he did 
again that night, and for days and nights to 
follow. Once a shell burst in his path and smashed 
the radiator; he plugged it up with wood and kept 
her going. It is provoking to be obliged to add 
that I was not in the car at the time. 

Nor did I thoroughly enjoy every minute of 
the hours I spent in it that Saturday night; there 
,was far too much occasion both for pangs and 
fears. Though we had kept open longer than any 
other hut, and everybody else (who was going) 
had left the town before us, yet the rest had gone 
on foot and it seemed a villainy to pass them 
plodding in the stream of refugees outside the 
town. It is true they all boarded lorries at thQ 



184 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

earliest opportunity, and actually reached our 
common haven before us; but that did not make 
our performance less inglorious at the time. Nor 
had we any extenuating adventures on the way. 
The road, we understood, was being heavily 
shelled; unless the enemy slumbered and slept, it 
was bound to be; but I for one saw nothing of it. 
The Ford hood reduced the landscape to a few; 
yards of moonlit track, and the Ford engine 
drowned all other noises of the night. But there 
was the perpetual apprehension of that which 
never once occurred. Wherever we stopped, it 
had been occurring freely. One of our huts, some 
kilometres out, was ringed with huge shell-holes; 
but none were added during the interminable time 
we waited in the road, while business was being 
transacted with which three of the four of us had 
nothing to do. I do not know which was greater, 
the relief of getting under way again, or the shame 
of leaving the crew of that hut to their fate. 

Yet we had but to forget our own miserable 
skins and sensibilities, to remember we were only 
on-lookers, and be thankful to be there that night 
in any capacity whatsoever. For the straight 
French road whereon we travelled — the wrong 
way, for our sins! — was choked 'with strings of 
lorries and motor-'buses full of reinforcements for 
the battle-line; silent men, miles and miles of 
them, mostly invisible, load after load; all em- 
bussed, not a single company to be seen upon the 
march. It was weird, but it was gorgeous: the 
tranquil moon above, the tossing dust below, and 
these tall land-ships, packed with fighting-men, 



'*:WE FALL TO RISE^' 185 

looming through by the hundred. This one, we 
kept saying, must be the last; but scarcely were 
we abreast, grazing her side, craning to make out 
the men behind her darkened ports, than another 
shipload broke dimly through the dust, to tower 
above us in its turn. 

Thousands and thousands of gallant hearts! 
Sometimes the men themselves fretted the top of 
a familiar 'bus — of course in khaki like its load — 
but for the most part they were out of sight inside. 
And — it may have been the drowning thud of 
their great engines, the noisier racket of our own 
^but not a human sound can I remember first 
or last. So they passed, speeding to the rescue; 
so they passed, how many to their reward ! Loud- 
er than our throbbing engines, and louder than 
the guns they deadened, the fighting blood of 
England sang that night through all these arteries 
of France; and our own few drops danced with 
our tears, hurt as it might to rush by upon the 
other side. 

What with one stoppage and another, and al- 
ways going against the stream of heavy traffic, the 
thirty or forty kilometres must have taken us 
three or four hours; and there, as I was saying, 
were our poor pedestrians in port before us. It 
dispelled anxiety, if it did no more. But there 
was no end to our mean advantages; for the good 
easy men were making their beds upon the bare 
boards of the local Y.M.C.A., where we found 
them with the refugees from yet another group 
of forsaken huts, some eighty souls in all. They 
assured us there were no beds to be had in the 



186 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

place, that the Town Major had commandeered 
every mattress. But a cunning and influential vet- 
eran whispered another story in my private ear; 
and on the understanding that his surreptitious 
arrangements should include the mate of the Rest 
Hut, we adjourned with our friend in need to the 
best hotel in the town, whence after supper we 
were conducted to a still better billet. Here were 
not only separate beds, with sheets on them, but 
separate rooms with muslin curtains, marbled 
wash-stands, clocks, and mirrors. It was true we 
had been forced to leave our heavy baggage at 
headquarters in our own poor town; and there 
had not been room in my despatch-case for any 
raiment for the night. But that was because I 
had refused to escape without my library rec- 
ords, whatever else was left behind. And the ex- 
tensive contact with cool linen could not lessen 
the glow of virtue, on that solitary head, with 
which I stretched myself out in comfort incon- 
ceivable fifteen hours before. 

The day, beginning with the shock received 
from the Scottish Padre at the head of the dun- 
geon stairs, had been packed with surprise, dis- 
appointment, irritation, mortal apprehension, and 
emotion more varied than any day of mine had 
ever yet brought forth. But I was physically 
tired out, and a great deal more stolid about it all 
that night than I feel now, six months after the 
event. The silence, I remember, was the only 
thing that troubled me, after those three days 
and nights of almost incessant shell-fire. But it 
was a joyous trouble — while it lasted. Hardly had 



''WE FALL TO RISE" 187 

I closed my eyes upon the moonlit muslin cur- 
tains, when I woke with a start to that unaltered 
scene. The only difference was the slightly irreg- 
ular hum of an enemy aeroplane, and the noise 
of bombs bursting all too near our perfect billet. 

In the Day of Battle 

It was not my first acquaintance with the town, 
nor yet with the hotel to which our billet was af- 
filiated. I had been there on a book-raid in bet- 
ter days. It was in that hotel I found the hero 
of Mie apophthegm: "Once a soldier — always a 
civilian !'' And now its dismal saloons were over- 
flowing with essential civilians who might have 
been soldiers all their lives; only here and there 
could one detect a difference; all seemed equally 
imbued with the traditional nonchalance of the 
British officer in a tight place. But for their 
uniform, and their martial carriage, they might 
have been a festive gathering of the Old Boys of 
any Public School. 

After breakfast we others sallied forth. The 
sun was still prematurely hot. The uninjured 
street was full not only of khaki, but of the towns- 
folk of both sexes, a new element to us in any but 
rare glimpses. Their Sunday faces betrayed no 
sign of special anxiety. The bells were tinkling 
peacefully for mass as we crossed the little river, 
flowing close behind the backs of the houses, and 
climbed the grassy height on which the citadel 
stands bastioned. A party of British soldiers was 
camped in its chill shadow; many were washing at 



188 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

the stream below, their bodies white as milk be- 
tween their trousers and their sunburnt necks. 
Some, I think, were actually bathing. They did 
not look like the battered remnant of a grand Bat- 
talion. Yet that was what they were. 

We foregathered with one chip from the modem 
battle-axe: a Sergeant and old soldier who had 
been through all the war and through South Af- 
rica. The last three days beat all. There had 
never been anything to touch them. Masses had 
melted before his eyes. There they were, as thick 
as corn, one minute, and the next they lay in 
swathes, and the next again the swathes were one 
continuous stack of dead. The illustration was 
the Sergeant's, and I know the fine rolling coun- 
tryside he got it from; but it was not the burden 
of his yarn. This came in so often, with an effect 
so variable, that I was puzzled, knowing the per- 
verse levity of the type. 

''No nation can stand it," were the exact words 
more than once. "No nation that ever was can 
go on standing it." 

"Do you mean ?" 

But I saw he didn't! The whites of his eyes 
were like an inner ring of brick-red skin, but it 
was their blue that flamed with sardonic hu- 
mour. 

"I mean the Germans!" cried he. "No nation on 
earth can go on standing what they had to stand 
yesterday and the day before. It's not in human 
nature to go on standing it. I don't say as we 
didn't get it too. . . ." 

Nor could he, while telling us what the rem- 



*^:WE FALL TO RISE^' 189 

nant in the tents and on the river-bank represent- 
ed; but all such information was imparted in the 
tone of a man making an admission for the sake 
of argument or fair play. If I remember, the Ser- 
geant had two wound-stripes under his pile of 
service chevrons. But he had borne more lives 
than a squad of cats. ''Each time I find I^m 
all right, I just shake 'ands with myself and carry 
on." We got him to shake hands with us, and so 
parted with a diamond in human form. 

Along the road below came the rag-time of a 
mediocre band; we hurried down and stood in a 
gateway to review a company of Australians 
marching into the town. This string of jewels 
was still unscattered by the fight, of the same high 
water as our south-country Sergeant, only dif- 
ferent in cut and polish, if not of set sarcas- 
tic purpose. They were marching in their own 
way; no stride or swing about it; but a more sub- 
tle jauntiness, a kind of mincing strut, perhaps 
not unconsciously sinister and unconventional, an, 
aggressive part of themselves. But what men! 
What beetling chests, what muscle-swollen sleeves, 
what dark, pugnacious, shaven faces! Here and 
there a pendulous moustache mourned the beard 
of some bushman of the old school; but no such 
adventitious aids could have improved upon the 
naked truculence of most of those mouths and 
chins. In their supercilious confidence they re- 
minded me of the early Australian cricketers, of 
beardless Blackham, Boyles and Bonnors taking 
the field to mow down the flower of English crick- 
et, in the days when those were our serious wars. 



190 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

How I had hated the type as a schoolboy sitting 
open-mouthed and heart-broken at the Oval! How 
I had feared it as a hobble-de-hoy in the bush it- 
self! But, in the day of battle, could there have 
been a better sight than this potential band of 
bushrangers and demon bowlers? Not to my 
glasses; nor one more bitter for the mate of the 
Rest Hut, thrice rejected from those very ranks. 

We wandered idly in their wake; and the next 
sight that I remember, though it may not have 
been that morning, was almost as cheering in its 
very different way. It was the spectacle of a sin- 
gle German prisoner, being marched through the 
streets by a single British soldier with fixed bayo- 
net. The prisoner was an N.C.O., and a fine de- 
fiant brute, marching magnificently just to show 
us. But his was not the hate that conceals hate ; 
he was the incarnation of the ineffable hymn, with 
his quick-firing eyes and the high angle of his 
powerful chin. Physically our man could not 
compare with him. And that seemed symbolical, 
at a moment when signs and symbols were in some 
request. 

Then there were the men one had met before. 
Congested as it was with traffic to and from the 
fighting, this little town was even more a rendez- 
vous for old acquaintance than the one from which 
we had beaten our compulsory retreat. I was 
always running into somebody I had known of old 
or through his people. One glorious young man, 
who had been much upon my mind, came into the 
restaurant where we were having lunch on the 
Tuesday. His eyes were clear but strained, his 



''WE FALL TO RISE" 191 

ears loaded with yellow dust that toned artisti- 
cally with his skin and hair. He said he had had 
his first sleep for five nights — under a railway 
arch. Before the war he had been up at Cam- 
bridge, and a very eminent Blue; if I said what 
he had it for, and what ribbon he was wearing 
now, I might as well break my rule and name him 
outright. But there had been three big brothers, 
then; now there was only this one left — and at 
one time not much of him. It did my heart good 
to see him here — looking as if he had never known 
a day's illness, or the pain of wounds or grief — 
looking a young god if there was one in France 
that day. 

But it was not only for his own or for his fam- 
ily's sake that the mere sight of this splendid fel- 
low was such a joy. The things he stood for were 
more precious than any life or group of lives. He 
stood for the generation which has been wiped out 
almost to a boy, as I knew it; he stood for his 
brothers, and for all our sons who made their sac- 
rifice at once; he stood for the English games, and 
for those who had seemed to live for games, but 
who jumped into the King's uniform quicker than 
they ever changed into flannels in their lives. "It 
is the one good thing the war has done — to give 
public-school fellows a chance — they are the one 
class who are enjoying themselves in this war." 
So wrote one whose early innings was of the short- 
est; and though it was a boyish boast, and they 
were not the only class by any means, I should like 
to know which other was quite as valuable when 
the war, too, was in its infancy? In each and 



192 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

every country, by one means or the other, the 
men were to be had: only our Public Schools 
could have furnished off-hand an army of natural 
officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and 
afraid of nothing in the world but fear itself. 
There were very few of the first lot left last 
March, and now there are many fewer. Of one 
particular Eton and Harrow match, I believe it 
can be said that not half-a-dozen of the twenty- 
two players are now alive. It was something to 
meet so noble a survivor, still leading in battle 
as he had learnt to lead at school and college, 
both on and off the field. 

Nor had one to hang about hotels and restau- 
rants, or camps or the street corners, to see men 
straight from the fight or just going in, and to 
take fresh heart from theirs. The chief local 
Y.M.C.A. was full of both kinds, one more ap- 
pealing than the other. It was perhaps the least 
conscious appeal ever made to human heart; for 
men are proud in the day of battle, and they 
are also mighty busy with their own affairs. 
What pocket stores they were laying in! What 
sanguine reserves of tobacco and cigarettes! 
That was a heartening sign. But there were no 
foreboding faces that I could see. It is one of 
the strong points of the inner soldier that he 
never thinks it is his turn; but if shell or bullet 
^'has his name on it," it will "see him off," as he 
also puts it. Some call this fatalism. I call it 
Faith. It is their plain way of bowing to the 
Will of God. But the only bow I saw was over 
the long last letters many were writing, as though 



*'WE FALL TO RISE'' 193 

the bugle was already blowing for them, as 
though they well knew what it meant. There was 
no looking unmoved upon those bent backs and 
hurrying hands. 

Nor were they the most poignant features; it 
was the men who had been in it that one could not 
keep one's eyes off. Those we had seen bathing in 
the morning were nothing to them. They had a 
night's rest behind them; these were brands still 
smoking from the fire. Dirty as dustmen, red- 
eyed, and with the growth of all these days upon 
their haggard faces, some sat at the tables, eating 
and drinking, like men who had just discovered 
their own emptiness; and many lay huddled on the 
floor, as on the battle-field itself, filling the hut 
with its very atmosphere. To step over them, 
and to sit with the men who had a mind to talk, 
was to get into the red heart of the thing that 
was going on. 

Not that they had very much to tell; all were 
hazy as to what had happened; but all agreed 
it was the worst thing they had been through 
yet, and all bore out our Sunday morning friend, 
that it was worse for the enemy than for any- 
body else. This unanimity was remarkable, espe- 
cially if you consider, first the military history 
of that last ten days in March, and secondly the 
fact that none of these unwounded stalwarts 
was there for a normal reason. Each stood for 
scores or hundreds who had gone under in the 
fight, or been taken prisoner. Yet it was worse 
for the enemy! Yet we were going to win! I 
cannot swear to the statement in those words, but 



194 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

it was implicit in their every utterance, and em- 
phatic in the things they never said. For though 
I brought biscuits to many, and sat while they 
steeped them in their mugs and gulped them 
down, not a first syllable of complaint reached 
my ears. On that I would take my stand in any 
witness-box. And a Y.M.C.A. man knows; they 
trust us, and speak their minds. 

Often in the winter "peace-time," as hinted 
early in these notes, I have seen men shudder at 
the prospect of the trenches, heard bitter mur- 
murs at the mud and misery, and have done my 
best to answer the natural cry: "When is this 
dreadful war going to finish? It will never be 
finished by fighting!" There was nothing of that 
sort to cope with now. In the winter I have heard 
lamentations for the stray man killed by a sniper 
or a stray shell. There was the case of the Lewis 
gunner who had earned his special leave; there 
was "the best wee sergeant/' and there were 
others. But there was none of that now that 
men were falling by the thousand; not from a 
single one of these ravenous, red-eyed survivors. 
You may say it was their hunger, weariness, and 
consequent insensibility, the acquiescence of the 
sleeper in the snow. But they were full of con- 
fidence, phlegmatic yet serene. They were on 
the winning side; there was never a doubt of it 
on their lips or in their eyes; and with us they 
had no reason to keep their doubts to themselves. 
They had voiced them freely in the winter. But 
now they had no doubts to voice. 

I do not propound their perspicacity, or postu- 



**WE FALL TO RISE'^ 195 

late an instinct they did not claim themselves. 
I merely state a fact from observation of these 
handfuls of men in the first days of the great 
crisis. That was the way they reacted against the 
greatest enemy success since the first month of 
the war. It is the English way, and always has 
been. And they happen to be busy finishing the 
old sequel as I write. 

Yet if you had seen their eyes! I remember 
as a little boy seeing Lady Butler's "Charge of 
the Light Brigade" at my first Academy. I am 
not sure that I have looked upon the canvas since, 
but the wild-eyed central figure, "back from the 
mouth of Hell," rises up before me after forty 
years. There is, to be sure, only the most odious 
of comparisons between his heroic stand and the 
posture of my friends, who were not posing for a 
Victorian battle-piece, but bolting biscuits and 
spilling tea on a Y.M.C.A. table in modem France. 
Nevertheless, some of them had those eyes. 



Other Old Fellows 

It was pleasant one morning to hear a sudden 
voice at my elbow: "How's the Rest Hut?" and 
to find at least one of its regular frequenters still 
whole and hearty, in the press outside this teem- 
ing Y.M.C.A. But a more embarrassing encoun- 
ter occurred the same day and on the same too 
public spot. 

It began in the hut, with a couple of sad young 
Jocks, who were like to be sad, as they might 
have said; but they only smiled in wry yet not 



196 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

unhumorous resignation. Their story was that of 
thousands upon the imperative stoppage of all 
leave. These two had started off on theirs, and 
were going aboard at Boulogne when headed back 
to their Battalion, which they had now to find. 
It chanced to be one of those to which I had 
helped to minister in the sunken road at Christ- 
mas. They remembered the Cocoa Man, as I 
had been called there, but in the morning they 
were not demonstrative. 

About mid-day we met again, and as I say, in 
the surging crowd outside the Y.M.C.A. This 
time the case was sadly altered ; the hapless pair 
had been consohng themselves at another spring, 
and were at the warm-hearted stage. Nothing 
was now too good for the poor Cocoa Man, no 
compliment too wildly hyperbolical. Falling with 
their unabated forces upon both his hands, only 
stopping short of the actual neck, they greeted 
him as "a brave mon" in that concourse of braves, 
and proceeded to embroider the charge with un- 
conscionable detail. 

"Thairty-five yarrds from the Gairmans," de- 
clared one, "this oV feller was teemin' cocoa in 
the trenches. Fm tellin' ye! Lash CVishmash 
— mind ye — shnow an' ische ! Thairty-five yarrds 
from the Gairmans — strike me dead!'' 

A vindictive Deity might well have taken him 
at his word, for dividing the real distance by more 
than ten. But nothing came of it except a mur- 
mur of general incredulity, obsequiously con- 
firmed by the Cocoa Man, and from the other 
Jock's wagging head a sentimental echo : "Thish 



''WE FALL TO RISE'' 197 

oF feller! Thish oV feller!" he could only say for 
the pavement's benefit. 

''Why was / there?" demanded the spokesman, 
with a rhetorical thump upon his chest. "Dis- 
cip-line — dis-cip-line^ — only reason / was there. 
But this or feller " 

"Thish or feller!" screamed the other, in a 
paroxysm of affection; and when I had eventually 
retrieved both hands I left them singing my lon- 
gevity in those terms, like a catch, and took my 
blushes to a safer part of the town. 

"IVe given them a bitty," whispered one of 
our ministers, who had assisted my escape, "and 
told them to go away and get something to eat" 

And the sly carnal wisdom of the advice, no 
less than the charity which made it practicable, 
left a good taste in the mouth. It was the kind 
of thing I ventured to think we wanted in our 
workers. In any community of sinners there is 
room for the saint who will help a man to get 
sober sooner than scold him for getting drunk. 

Not that I saw above half-a-dozen tipsy men 
in all the huts that I was ever in. They were to 
be seen, no doubt, but they did not come our way. 
The soldier who seeks the Y.M. in his cups is 
not a hardened case. He is the last person to 
be discouraged, as he will be the first to deplore 
his imprudence in the morning. I have heard a 
splendid young New Zealander speak of the lapse 
that had cost him his stripes as though nobody 
had ever made so dire a fool of himself. That 
is the kind of notion to scout even at the cost of 
a high line in these matters. It is possible to 



198 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

make too much of the virtues that come easily 
to ourselves; and to the average Y.M.C.A. man 
the cardinal virtues seemed very like second na- 
ture. This is not covert irony, but a simple fact 
which, for that matter, ought hardly to have been 
otherwise, since most of us were ministers of one 
denomination or another. The minority were 
apt to feel, but were not necessarily justified in 
feeling, that a more liberal admixture of "sinful 
lajmien" might have put us, as a body, even more 
intimately in touch with the men than we un- 
doubtedly were. 

Chief, however, among the virtues of my com- 
rades, I think any unprejudiced observer would 
have placed that of Courage. There were now 
no fewer than eighty of us, all leaves before the 
wind of war, blown helter-skelter into this little 
town that must be nameless. We had come off 
all sorts and sizes of trees, down to the most sen- 
sitive and frailest; but from the first squall to 
the last we were permitted to face, and throughout 
these days of precarious shelter, in many ways 
a higher test, I never saw a man among us out- 
wardly the worse for nerves. And be it known 
that the small personal escapes and excitements, 
recorded in these notes, were as nothing to the 
full-size adventures of a great many of our ref- 
ugees. In outlying huts, cheek by jowl with the 
camps they served, the shelling had been far 
heavier and more direct than the officers of the 
Rest Hut had been privileged to undergo; the 
responsibility had been much greater, and the 
means of escape not to be compared with ours. 



''WE FALL TO RISE*' 199 

Little home-made dug-outs, under the hut itself, 
had been their nearest approach to our vaulted 
dungeon, a tattoo of shrapnel their variety of 
shell-music. Whole walls had been blown in on 
them, men killed and wounded under the riddled 
roof. Some had suffered even more from a body- 
guard of our own guns than from the enemy; one 
reverend gentleman declared in writing that his 
"hut reeled like a ship in a great sea." 

Another wrote: ''A wave of gas entered our 
domain and we had a season of intense coughing 
and sneezing, also watering of eyes. Thinking 
it was but a passing wave of gas from our own 
guns, we did not use our respirators, but reaching 
up to a box of sweets I distributed them to my 
comrades, and we lay sucking sweets to take away 
the taste." (This was a Baptist minister with 
a South African ribbon, and not the man to lie 
long doing anything.) "After breakfast I called 
upon the Artillery Officers to offer my staff 
to make hot cocoa and supply biscuits during 
the morning for the hard-worked gun-teams, an 
offer which he gratefully accepted. I then made 
my way up to the dressing-station to see if the 
Medical Officer required our services for the walk- 
ing wounded. His reply being in the affirmative, 
I took stock of the equipment we had on the spot, 
then went back to bring up all necessary articles, 
also my comrades. The small hut we have near 
the dressing-station for this work was being so 
hotly shelled that the M.O. would not allow us 
to remain there, so we worked outside the dress- 
ing-station door, a little more sheltered, but still 



200 NOTES OP A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

exposed to shell-fire. We comforted the wounded, 
gave them hot tea and free cigarettes. A lull 
occurred during the morning in our work, so 

Mr. returned to make the cocoa for the 

gun-teams, Mr. remained to carry on at 

the dressing-station and I returned to clear the 
cash-boxes, fill my pockets with rescued paper- 
^oney, prepared again for emergency. . . . We 
continued our work with the wounded, and as 
the same increased in number, I then assisted in 
bandaging the smaller wounds, having knowledge 
of that kind of work. Later, the A.P.M. gave 
me his field-glasses and asked me to act as ob- 
server and report to him every change in the 
progress of the battle of the ridges. This was 
most interesting work, but meant constant ex- 
posure. One of our aeroplanes sounded its hoot- 
er and dropped a message about 600 yards away. 
On reporting it I was asked to cross over and see 
that the message was delivered to the correct 
battery." 

This was a man! But do not forget he was 
also a Baptist minister on a four-month fur- 
lough at the front. *'Once a soldier!" he too may 
have said after his first campaign, and clinched 
it by entering his ministry; but here he was in 
his pious prime, excelling his lay youth in deeds 
of gallantry, and covering our civilian heads with 
his reflected glory. No wonder he ''heard from 
two sources that my work on that day received 
mention in military despatches." Let us hope it 
did. "If true," he makes haste to add, "the work 
of my two colleagues is as much deserving." But 



"WE FALL TO RISE'' 201 

who inspired them? Before they turned their 
backs, ^'the advancing Germans were only about 
700 yards away. Securing some of our goods, we 
decided to retire upon for the night and re- 
turn if possible the next day." The last six words 
italicise themselves. 

The party went out of the frying-pan into 
heavier fire further back: "Soon after we had 
retired to rest the Germans commenced to bom- 
bard the place with high velocity shells from long 
range. ... A Lieutenant in our hut went to the 
door but reeled back immediately with a shattered 
arm. A Corporal outside received a nasty wound 
in the shoulder. We set to work bandaging the 
wounds of these men and making them comfort- 
able while others went to obtain a conveyance. 
There was no shelter, so after the wounded were 
safely on their way to a C.C.S. we lay down in 
our blankets, considering it as easy to be shelled 
in the warm as standing in the cold" — more wine 
that needs no printer's bush. Later, he relieved 
the leader of a very hot hut indeed, where he had 
for colleague "one who was calm in the hour of 
danger." Here the congenial pair "were able to 
carry on for four days when the order came for 
us to evacuate. We distributed our stock of goods 
to the soldiers, then closed up. That night we 
lay in our blankets counting the bursting shells 
around us at three shells per minute." On their 
arrival in our common port, naturally not before, 

"the effects of the gas at began to make 

themselves felt, and I was ordered by the Medi- 
cal Officer to take a week's complete rest" On© 



202 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

wonders if a rest was better earned in all those 
terrific days. 

The document from which I have been quoting 
is only one of many placed at my disposal. It is 
typical of them all, exceptional solelj^ in the tell- 
ing simplicity of the narrator. The writer was 
not our only minister who came through the fire 
pure gold ; he was not even the only Baptist min- 
ister. One there was, the gentlest of souls, whose 
heroic story I may yet make shift to tell, though 
it deserves the hand of Mr. Service or of "Wood- 
bine Willie." Such were the men I had the hon- 
our of working with last winter, and of such their 
adventures as against the personal experiences it 
was necessary to recount first or else not at all. I 
confess they make my Rest Hut look a little torf 
restful as I set them down ; for there we were won- 
derfully spared the tangible horrors of the situa- 
tion; but many of these others, as little used to 
blood-shed as ourselves, had left a shambles be- 
hind them, and looked upon the things that haunt 
a mind. 

And yet, as I began by saying, not a man of 
them showed shaken nerves, or what mattered 
more to those of us who had seen less, a shaken 
faith. Therein they were not only worthy of the 
men they had served so devotedly to the end, but 
of the sublime tradition it was theirs to uphold. 
It was a great matter that there should not have 
been one heart among us so faint as to affect 
another, that we should have carried ourselves 
at least outwardly as I think we did. But to 
some of us it seemed a yet greater matter, m 



''WE FALL TO RISE*' 203 

the days of anti-climax and reaction now in store, 
that those to whom we were entitled to look for 
spiritual support did not fail us in a single in- 
stance. 



WOODEN CROSSES 

"Go live the wide world over—hut when you come to 

die, J. T w 

A quiet English churchyard is the only place to Lie! — • 
J held it half a lifetime, until through war's mischance 
I saw the wooden crosses that fret the fields of France. 

A thrush sings in an oak-tree, and from the old square 

tower 
A chime as sweet and mellow salutes the idle hour: 
Stone crosses take no notice— hut the little wooden 

ones . , 7 

Are thrilling every minute to the music of the guns! 

Upstanding at attention they face the cannonade. 
In apple-pie alinement like Guardsmen on parade: 
But Tombstones are Civilians who loll or sprawl or 

sway ^ T J 

At every crazy angle and stage of slow decay. 

For them the Broken Columrir—in its plot of unkempt 



The tawdry tinsel garland safeguarded under glass; 

And the Squire's emhlazoned virtues, that would over- 
weight a Saint, 

On the vault empaled in ironr-scaling red for want of 
paint! 

The men who die for England don't need it rubbing in; 
An automatic stamper and a narrow strip of tin 
Record their date and regiment, their number and 

their name'^~— 
And the Squire who dies for England is treated just 

the same. 

205 



206 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

So stand the still battalions: alert, austere, serene; ^ 

Each with his just allowance of brown earth shot with 
green; 

None better than his neighbour in pomp or circum- 
stance — 

All beads upon the rosary that turned the fate of 
France I 

Who says their war is over? While others carry on. 
The little wooden crosses spell but the dead and gone? 
Not while they deck a sky-line, not while they crown 

a view. 
Or a living soldier sees them and sets his teeth anew! 

The tenants of the churchyard where the singing 
thrushes build 

Were not, perhaps, all paragons of promise well ful- 
filled: 

Some failed — through Love, or Liquor — while the par- 
ish looked askance. 

But — you cannot die a Failure if you win a Cross in 
France! 

The brightest gems of Valour in the Army's diadem 
Are the V.C. and the D.S.O., M. C. and D.C.M, 
But those who live to wear them will tell you they are 

dross 
Beside the Final Honour of a simple Wooden Cross, 



VII 

THE REST CAMP— AND AFTER 

Y.M.C.A. work was over for the time being in 
the fighting areas. Hundreds of huts and moun- 
tains of stores had been abandoned or destroyed. 
What was to be done with the six or seven dozen 
of us, now thoroughly superfluous men (and as 
many more in other centres), was the imme- 
diate problem. It was solved by the High Com- 
mand putting at our disposal an Army rest-camp 
on the coast. 

Thither we all started by rail on the evening of 
Tuesday, March 26th. Ten minutes after our 
train left, the station was heavily bombed; half- 
an-hour later we were lying low in a cutting, un- 
der a mercilessly full moon, but perhaps in deeper 
shadow than we supposed, while a German aero- 
plane scoured the sky for mischief. There was 
an Anti- Aircraft Battery also concealed about the 
district; thanks to its activities, we were at length 
able to proceed with less fear of molestation. 
But only fitfully; the full moon saw to that. It 
was as light as noonday through smoked glasses, 
and very soon our train was hiding in the next 
wood that happened to intersect the line. 

Did we waste time talking about it, discussing 
our chances, or mildly anathematising our last- 

207 



208 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

straw luck? Not for many minutes; at least, not 
in the bare truck round which some fifty of us 
squatted on our baggage. We had begun the last 
stage of our exodus in a certain fashion; and in 
that fashion we went on — and on. Before we 
were five minutes out, one of them had struck 
up a hymn, and we had sung it with all our lungs 
and hearts. Another and another followed; and 
in the stoppages, after a human peep at the sky, 
and a silence broken by the beat of the destroy- 
er^s engine, there was always some exalted voice 
to lead us yet again, and a stentorian following 
every time. Though the tunes were often strange 
to me, and to my mind no improvement on the 
ones I wanted, the hymns themselves were the old 
hymns that take a man back to his old home and 
his old school. Each was like a bottle charged 
with the essence of some ancient scene. One 
savoured the scents of vanished rooms, heard the 
sound of voices long past singing, or long ago 
stilled; forgotten influences, childish promptings, 
looks and thoughts and sayings, came leaping out 
of the dead past into that dark truck hiding for 
dear life in a wood. And of all the unreal situa- 
tions I was ever in — or invented, for that matter — 
this at last struck me as about the most uncon- 
vincing and far-fetched. Yet at the same time, 
like all else that really matters, it seemed the 
most natural thing in the world: as though the 
whole history of mankind had not led up to the 
horrors and splendours of this stupendous war 
more inevitably than our fifty life-lines converged 



4 



THE REST CAMP— AND AFTER 209 

in that truck-load of brave, faithful, hymn-sing- 
ing men. 

Then a hymn would end, and there would be 
sometimes as much as a minute of natural talk 
and normal thinking. But it was like the lorries 
full of fighting-men in the moonlit dust; always 
a new leader filled the breach; and the officers of 
the Rest Hut had long been stolid listeners when 
we stopped once more, not to hide, but at some 
station, and that weary pair sneaked out into 
another truck. Here there were but other two 
before them: a sardonic Anglican, and a young 
man enviably asleep under less covering than 
would have soothed our thinner blood. Side by 
side we cowered upon a packing-case, a Rest Hut 
blanket about our legs, and discussed the sec- 
ular situation over a pipe. Almost the last thing 
we two had heard in the town was a whisper about 
the German cavalry; a rumour so sensational that 
we were keeping it to ourselves; but it only con- 
firmed the mate in his prophetic conviction that 
the fools were just cutting their own throats 
deeper with every mile they advanced. That was 
his hymn; not a stage of our flight had he failed 
to beguile with the grim refrain; but in the truck 
I seem to recall a wilder dream of getting into 
some dead man's uniform, if the other folly went 
much further, and risking a firing-party for one 
blow at a Boche by fair or foul. It was perhaps 
as well that we were going beyond the reach of 
any such desperate temptations. 

The Rest Camp was on a chilly plateau at the 
mouth of the Somme: it might have been the 



210 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

Murrambidgee for all the warfare within reach. 
A few faint flashes claimed our wistful attention 
on a clear night, but I have heard the guns bet- 
ter here in Sussex. On the other hand, it was a 
military camp, laid out on scientific principles 
that appealed to the camp-following spirit, and 
military discipline kept us on our acquired met- 
tle. I had not slept under canvas for thirty years, 
and rather dreaded it, especially as the weather 
had turned cold and unsettled. A tent in the rain 
had perhaps more terrors for many of us than a 
snug hut under occasional shell-fire; but few if 
any were the worse for the experience. Indeed, 
the chief drawback was an appetite out of all pro- 
portion to available rations; but, though tempers 
were at times on edge, and fists clenched in the 
bacon queue, on one of our few bacon mornings, 
no grumbling disgraced the board. We reminded 
ourselves and each other of the lads we had left 
to bear the brunt, and we started our humdrum 
days with vociferous jocosity in the wash-house. 

Easter was upon us before we were fairly set- 
tled, or a tent pitched large enough to hold us 
all; and it was "in sundry places," indeed, that we 
mobilised as a congregation. One was the open 
shed in which we shivered over meals, and one 
the camp shower-baths. But on Easter Day, 
which was fine and bright, all adjourned to a 
neighbouring wood, then breaking into bud and 
song ; and sitting or leaning in a circle against the 
trees, at the intersection of two green rides, we 
held our service in Nature's sanctuary. In that 
fing of unmilitary men in khaki there were few 



THE REST CAMP— AND AFTER 211 

who had not been nearer violent death than ever 
in their lives before, very few but were prepared 
to face it afresh at the first chance, one at least 
who was soon to be killed behind his counter; 
and presently a young man standing in our midst, 
an Anglican with a Nonconformist gift of speech, 
brought the spring morning home to our hearts, 
filled them with thankfulness for our lot and trust 
in the issue, and pride of sacrifice, and love of 
Him Who showed the way, in a sermon one would 
not have missed for the best they were getting 
in London at that hour. It was not the only fine 
sermon we had in the Rest Camp ; and wonderful 
it was Fo hear the same simple note struck so 
often, albeit from different angles of the Chris- 
tian faith, and so seldom forced. We must have 
had representatives of all the English-spoken 
Churches, save and except the parent of them all ; 
constantly an Anglican and a Dissenter would 
officiate together, with many a piquant compro- 
mise between their respective usages; but when 
it came to preaching, they were like searchlights 
trained from divers quarters upon the same cen- 
tral fact of Christianity. The separate beams 
might taper off into the night, but high overhead 
they met and mingled in a single splendour. 

But there was one minister who took no part; 
he lay too sick in our tent; and yet his mere rec- 
ord is the sermon I remember best. He was that 
other Baptist already mentioned, a shy bachelor 
of fifty, the most diffident and (one might have 
thought) least resolute of men. A lad he loved 
had come out and been killed; the impulse took 



212 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

him to follow and throw himself into the war 
in the only capacity open to his years. The 
Y.M.C.A. is the refuge of those consciously or 
unconsciously in quest of this anodyne. We had 
met at my first hut, where he had slaved many 
days as an extra hand. Never was one of us so 
deferential towards the men; never were they 
served with a more intense solicitude, or ad- 
dressed across the counter with so many marks of 
respect. "Sir," he never failed to call them to 
their faces, or "this gentleman" when invoking 
expert intervention. That gentleman, being one, 
never smiled ; but we did, sometimes, in our room. 
Then one Sunday I persuaded him to preach. It 
was a revelation. The hut had heard nothing 
simpler, manlier, straighter from the shoulder; 
and the war, not just then the safest subject, was 
finely and bravely treated, both in the sermon 
and the final prayer. A fighting sermon and a 
fighting prayer, for all the gentle piety that 
formed the greater part, and all the sensitive 
mannerism which would never make us smile 
again. 

At that time our outpost in the support line, 
scene of my Christmas outing, had been running 
a good many weeks ; and its popularity as a holi- 
day resort was not imperceptibly upon the wane. 
Most of us had tasted its fearful joys, and there 
were no offers for a second helping; it was em- 
phatically a thing to have done rather than the 
thing to do again. It came to the Baptist's turn, 
and when his week was up there was a genuine 
difficulty in reheving him, one or two on the rota 



THE EEST CAMP— AND AFTER 213 

having fallen sick. Our young commandant went 
up to ask if he would mind doing an extra day 
or two. Mind ! It was his one desire ; he was as 
happy as a king — and he had quite transformed 
the place. The tiny hut was no longer the pig- 
sty described in an earlier note; it was as neat 
and spotless as an old maid's sanctum. The urns 
were like burnished silver. The fire never smoked. 
The bed had been brought in from the unspeak- 
able tunnel under the sand-bags; it was as dry as 
a bone, and curtained off at its own end of the 
cabin. All these improvements the Baptist had 
wrought single-handed, besides fending and 
cooking for himself: no Battalion Headquarters 
for him! An extra week was just what he had 
been longing for; in point of fact, he stayed four 
weeks on end, as against my four paltry days! 

Shells arrived in due course; death happened at 
the door; men grievously wounded staggered in 
for first aid; the lengthening days kept him fire- 
less till evening; but the cocoa had never been 
so well made, or so continuous the supply. Once 
a big shell burst within a yard of the grassy roof, 
on the very edge of the high ground of which the 
roof was a colourable extension. It brought down 
all the mugs and urns and condensed-milk tins 
with a run ; and that day we did see the Baptist 
at our mid-day board. "It shook me up a bitty," 
he confessed with his shy laugh ; but back he went 
in the afternoon ; and illness alone restored him to 
us when the month was up. 

But the gem of his performance was an act of 
moral gallantry: and here is needed the Rough 



214 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

Rhyme of a Padre or of a Red Cross Man. One 
cold night a Sergeant-Major — Regimental, I do 
believe^ — ^honoured the cabin with his presence, 
only to fire a burst of improper language at the 
weather and the war. The Baptist, whom we 
may figure on the verge of genuflexion before the 
august guest, lost not a moment in standing up 
to him. 

"You can't talk like that here, sir!" he cried 
with stern simplicity. ''It's not allowed!" 

"Can't," if you please, and "not allowed!" You 
picture the audience settling down to the dread- 
ful drama, hear the cold shudders of the callow, 
see the turkey-cock turning an appropriate pur- 
ple. He very soon showed what he could do ; but 
it was no longer a spontaneous or such a glib dis- 
play. The rum that happened somehow to be in 
him seems to have had something to do with this; 
but not, it may be, as much as the Sergeant- 
Major pretended; and the torpor that rather sud- 
denly supervened I diagnose as the ready resource 
of an expert in camouflage. Better gloriously 
drunk than ignominiously admonished by an un- 
printable hiatus of a Y.M. Padre ! 

So a party of muscular volunteers escorted the 
S.M. to his dug-out. But the next day he re- 
turned alone, crisp-footed and square-jawed, ap- 
parently to put the Baptist in his place for ever. 
Exactly what followed, that gentle hero was not 
the man to relate. Again one pictures Peeping 
Tommies exposing themselves on the sunken road 
to see the fun, perhaps the murder; but what I 
really believe they might have seen, before many 



THE EEST CAMP— AND AFTER 215 

minutes were up, was the spectacle of the two 
protagonists upon their knees. 

Stranger things have been happening, even on 
that sunken road of ours. It was lost to us in 
those very days of the Army Rest Camp ; it had 
not been recovered when I was busy expatiating 
on its Christmas charms; its recovery was one 
of the first loose stones in the avalanche of vast 
events which has caught me up. . . . And now 
they say the war is over! To have seen some- 
thing of it all in the last dark hour— and noth- 
ing since — is to find even more than the old war- 
time difficulty in believing half one hears. One 
has too many fixed ideas and violent impressions, 
not only of those four months, but of these four 
years: a man has to clear his own entanglements 
before he can begin to advance with such times. 
In the meantime the patter about Indemnities 
and Demobilisation leaves him cold. Demobili- 
sation will have to begin nearer home than char- 
ity, in the armies of our thoughts; and some are 
not as highly disciplined as others, some hearts 
too sore to enter as they would into this Peace. 

For them there is still the Y.M.C.A. That 
little force of camp-followers still holds the field, 
has nothing to say to any Armistice, may well 
have started its most strenuous campaign. With 
the Armies of Occupation its work will hardly 
be the romantic enterprise it was; with all the 
danger, most of the glamour will have departed; 
but the deeper attractions are the less adventi- 



216 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

tious, while the Rhine at any rate should provide 
some piquant novelties in place of old excite- 
ments. The grand fleet of huts will soon be an- 
chored there — including, as I hope, the new Rest 
Hut that was to have been tucked up close behind 
the Line. Once more before each counter there 
will be the old press of imatchless manhood and 
humanity; neater and sprucer, I make no doubt, 
but otherwise neither more nor less like con- 
quering heroes than their old unconquerable 
selves; and just once more, behind the counter, 
the chance of a lifetime, but the last chance, for 
"sinful laymen" of the milder sort! 

Will it be taken? Are our courageous ministers 
to have the last field practically to themselves, 
or will a few mere men of the world even now 
step in, if only for the honour of the laity? They 
would if they knew what the work is like and 
what it may be made, how free a hand is given 
one, how generously one is met by all concerned, 
and the modicum of spiritual equipment essen- 
tial if only that modicum be sincere. Pre-war 
notions about the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation still militate a little against the Y.M.C.A. 
for all the halo of success attaching to those capi- 
tals; but hear a soldier from the front upon the 
Y.M. tout court, and his affectionate abbrevia- 
tion of an abbreviation will in itself tell you 
something of the institution as it is to-day. It 
has meant rather more to him than "tea and 
prayer in equal parts"; yet that conception still 
prevails in superior circles. Quite lately I heard 



THE REST CAMP— AND AFTER 217 

a dignitary of the Established Church speak with 
pain of a brilHant young Oxford man of his ac- 
quaintance, who, rejected of the Army, must 
needs be "giving out tea in some tent in France!" 
It seemed to him a truly shocking waste of fine 
material; but if that young man was not giving 
out a great deal more than creature comforts, and 
getting at least as good as he gave, then it was a 
still more wanton waste of an opportunity which 
the finest young man alive might have been proud 
to seize. 

The truth is, of course, that no man is too good 
for this job. He may be a specialist, and more 
valuable to the community where he is than he 
would be (to the community) in a Y.M.C.A. or 
a Church Army hut. He may be a Cabinet 
Minister, a Bishop, or a Judge: that does not 
make him too good to minister to the men who 
have borne the brunt of this war: it only makes 
him too busy and perhaps too old. One must not 
even now be extra liable to "die of winter," as the 
Tynesider said, nor yet too dainty about bed and 
board. But the better the man, the better he 
will do this work, the more he will bring to it, 
the more he will find in it; the greater will be his 
tact, the greater his loving-kindness and humil- 
ity; the readier will he be to recognise many a 
better man than himself in our noble rank-and- 
file — to learn all they have to teach him in pa- 
tience and naturalness, unselfishness and simplic- 
ity — and to perceive the higher service involved 
in serving them, even across a counter. 



218 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

To Him that made the Heavens move and cease not in 

their motion — 
To Him that leads the haltered tides twice a day 

round ocean — 
Let His name he magnified in all poor folks^ devotion! 

Not for Prophecies and Powers, Visions, Gifts and 

Graces, 
But the unrelenting hours that grind us in our places. 
With the burden on our backs, the smile upon our 

faces. 

Not for any miracle of easy loaves and fishes, 

But for work against our will and waiting 'gainst our 

wishes — 
Such as gathering up the crumbs and cleaning dirty 

dishes. 

It may or may not be that Mr. Kipling is think- 
ing of the Y.M.C.A. I do not know the title of 
his poem, or whether it has yet appeared else- 
where, or another line of it. These lines I owe 
to his kindness, and as usual they crystallise all 
that one was trying to say. But to some of us 
the crumbs that fell were a feast of fine human- 
ity, and great indeed was his reward who gath- 
ered them. 



THE BIG THING 

(1918) 

It was a British Linesman. His face was like a fist, 
His sleeve all stripes and chevrons from the elbow 

to the wrist. 
Said he to an American (with other words of his): 
"IVs a big thing you are doing — do you know how big 

it isV 

"I guess, Sir/^ that American inevitably drawled, 
^'Big Bill's our proposition an' we're goin' for him 

bald. 
You guys may have him rattled, but I figure it's for us 
To slaughter, quarter, grill or bile, an' masticate the 



"I hope your teeth,'' the Linesman said, "are equal to 

your tongue — 
But that's the sort of carrion that's better when it's 

hung. 
Yet — the big thing you're doing I should like to make 

you see!" 
"Our stunt," said that young Yankee, "is to set the 

whole world free!" 

The Linesman used a venial verb (and other parts of 

speech) : 
"That's just the way the papers talk and politicians 

preach! 
But apart from gastronomical designs upon the Hun — 
And the rather taller order — there's a big thing that 

you've DONE." 

219 



220 NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER 

^'Why, say! The biggest thing on earth j to any cute 
on-looker, 

Is Old Man Bull and Uncle Sam aboard the same 
blamed hooker! 

One crew, one port, one speed ahead, steel-true twin- 
hearts within her: 

One ding-dong English-singin* race — a race without a 
winner!" 

The boy's a boyish mixture — halj high-brow and half 

droll: 
So brave and naive and cock-a-hoop —so sure yet pure 

of soul! 
Behold him bright and beaming as the bridegroom 

after church — 
The Linesman looking wistful as a rival in the lurch! 

i 

"Fd love to be as young as you!" he doesn't even 

swear — 
"Love to be joining up anew and spoiling for my share! 
But when your blood runs cold and old, and brain and 

bowels squirm. 
The only thing to ease you is some fresh blood in the 

firm. 

"When the war was young, and we were young, we 

felt the same as you: 
A few short months of glory — and we didn't care how 

few! 
French, British and Dominions, it took us all the 

same — 
Who knows but what the Hun himself enjoyed his 

dirty game! 

"We tumbled out of tradesmen's carts, we fell off office 

stools — 
Fathers forsook their families, boys ran away from 

schools; 



THE BIG THING 221 

Mothers untied their apron-strings, lovers unloosed 

their arms — 
All Europe was a wedding and the bells were war's 

alarms! 

''The chime had changed-— You took a pull— the old 

wild peal rings on 
With the clamour and the glamour of a Generation 

gone! 
Their fun — their fire — their heart's desire — are bom 

again in You! 
"That the big thing we're doin'," 

''It's as big as Man can do!" 



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